Ladies and Gentlemen,

The December Long Contest for 2011 has concluded, and no prizes for guessing, we have a clear winner this time. Without any need of an introduction, Tiancheng Lou leads the pack for the second consecutive time. He has figured in the top 2 for seven times in this year and finishes the year on a high taking the top slot once again! It has also been a tremendous performance from Hirose from Japan, a first appearance in the top 10. Congratulations to both of them.

The Indian rank list has 16 contestants tied at the 7th position with many new faces in the top 20! For the first time Balajiganapathi has cracked the top 2 and in what a style! The second place deserves a special mention for being occupied by the relatively unknown but very promising Archit Karandikar from IIT Indore, closely followed by Anoop Chaurasiya. As with Balaji, this is their best performance till date on CodeChef and we hope that they only improve from here. Congratulations to both of them.

Needless to say all the excitement of the contest wouldn’t have been served had the dish not been cooked so well by our extremely talented problem setters and the very vigilant tester.

AnhDQ, Gennady Korotkevitch, Hiroto Sekido and Vamsi Kavala prepared the problems while the most reliable David Stolp sampled them before they were served to you.

The statistics and the final winners list follow:

Contest Statistics:

Not withstanding the difficult problem set, the participation improved quite a bit from the last time. This is encouraging. We will still be glad to know from the community if there is anything that we can do to improve participation more. Please give us the feedback on the quality and level of difficulty of the problems.

And now, here are the distinct winners for the December contest:

India:

1. balajiganapath
2. architk
3. imagin
4. udayrocks2k8
5. anshulgoyal
6. svm11
7. ashish.pant
7. balakrishnan_v
7. bittu_it
7. crazysaikat
7. dudechandan123
7. gurpreet_09
7. javadecoder
7. Johar
7. mcsharma1990
7. mng88
7. mukulgupta
7. navinag
7. saurabhmodi102000
7. sharatiitr
7. vaibhavbahl
7. xyler

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
2. hirosegolf
3. gawry
4. iscsi
5. binon
6. pasin30055
7. hiphip
8. shindo
9. ushsh
10. success

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here. Do not forget to pester the problem setter with all your doubts there. Yes they will answer each one of your questions directly.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 18th of December. It begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Midnight greetings, CodeCheffers!

The November Cook-Off contest has concluded. It was a good fight for the top spot between petr and lyrically until the final hour or so when ogiekako suprisingly chipped in to the 2nd spot.

It was a well balanced problem set, thanks to Gennady Korotkevich and Anton Lunyov. A big round of applause for them plesae. Gennady, also incidentally made a problem setting debut on CodeChef today. yay!!

There was another debut which we are sure may not have gone un-noticed Yes, please welcome petr on CodeChef. He is currently ranked 2nd across most global programming sites.

The contest also had good number of participation from Japan and Russia which may be due to Gennady’s problem set. Indian participation was subdued which left us sad

Now, moving on to the winners of this contest:

01. petr
02. ogiekako
03. lyrically
04. KADR
05. dzhulgakov
06. raveman
07. al13n
08. laycurse
09. Ra16bit
10. jughead

The final Cook-Off rankings can be viewed here.

The statistics for the November Cook-Off are as follows:

As you can see, the participation numbers were not swelling, but the contest was well fought out. For the first time, we had the Indian participation being less than the Rest of the World!

The editorials for the problem set can be viewed here.

We hope you guys mark out your calendar for the next Cook-Off since its going to be the final Cook-Off for this year. We will be also be hosting as usual our regular long contest on December 1st. See you guys there. In between, keep your likes, mails and tweets coming to us. We love to respond to them.

Regards,
Tojo Chacko.

Comrades of code!

I bring you news at this ungodly hour, for it is news worth knowing!

The October Cook-off, 2011, concluded an hour ago.

It started amidst great confusion and borderline panic, because of a lot of carelessness from our side. Problems weren’t visible, the problem statements weren’t updated, the Time Limits were messed up… I think it’s better if you don’t know too much.

For this mishap, we truly apologise. Firstly, to our problem setter and tester, Anton Lunyov and David Stolp. They penned the entire contest from scratch, and our mistakes jeopardized a good fifteen minutes of it. They are not to blame.

We’d like to thank them for what has proven to be a well-balanced set, although marginally biased again towards the mathematical spectrum of programming; sources claim our setter Mr. Lunyov likes his problems “mathy.” What do you think?

After the initial hiccups though, things at the back end stabilized, and all of us here got to witness an enjoyable latter half of the contest, as the top ranks changed a few times. We have here some screenshots that may garner your interest…

How they stood a little over an hour before the end of the contest.

Then, at 2307 hrs…

Gennady moves up to second by solving LAMQUGAM… without a penalty.

At 2313 hrs, as PERMDIG saw another successful submission…

artem_rakhov jumps into contention from 6th, just like Gennady did.

At 2325 hrs, PERMDIG saw YET ANOTHER successful submission…

Gennady solves his last problem without a penalty, takes the top spot; “what a comeback!” we exclaimed.

But, with only eight minutes to go…

EgorK reclaimed his first position with a penalty-less submission for LAMQUGAM, and deservedly took the cake.

So, as one too many penalties proved costly for Gennady, the contest drew to a close. Also, if you may have noticed above, mikhailOK managed yet another flawless submission. While scouting the top few names for plausible winners, his was the only one without any penalties. But with so little time to go, it ended at…

Notice the final submission for LAMQUGAM by KADR, who deservedly reached 7th, and our POTM laycurse, who held the record for maximum penalties in the top 10. =D

So, just as above, here are your winners:

1.  EgorK
2.  gennady.korotkevich
3.  mikhailOK
4.  artem_rakhov
5.  uwi
6.  iwiwi
7.  KADR
8.  laycurse
9.  damians
10. xcwgf666

A special mention to mikhailOK for being the only to executing a flawless competition while solving four problems. Pity you didn’t get LAMQUGAM.

The final Cook-off rankings can be viewed here.

Here are the usual statistics for the page:

The editorials for all problems can be viewed here.

Once again, sincere apologies to the problem setter and tester, and to all the participants themselves. We ask you to have faith in us. You will not be disappointed.

We hope to see you competing in the upcoming November Long Contest, which begins at 1500 hrs on the first day of the next month.

Cheers,
Adarsh Loyal,
Team CodeChef.

Patrons of programming!

The October Long Contest for 2011 concluded this afternoon at 1500 hrs (IST). And what a good contest it was!

Unlike the September Challenge, there were no ties on the global as well as the Indian rank list. This is a testimony in the form of a standing ovation to the quality of the problems; for which we are profoundly grateful to the problem setters and tester.

The men responsible are Gennady Korotkevitch, Vamsi Kavala, Hiroto Sekido, Anirban Mitra, AnhDQ, Ankul Garg, and problem tester Harsha S. Thank you once again!

Now, for a special mention to our indigenous programmers: For the first time in the history of the CodeChef Long Contest, the global top-10 ranks included five Indian programmers. Seeing as all of us here at CodeChef share that nationality, we were understandably pleased. Well done guys, you make us proud.

Just a little more trivia before we move on to the lists of winners. The aggregate number of submissions this month was nearly double than that of last month’s. This may well be the result of a cleverly-crafted challenge problem, for which we have none other to thank than Mr. Korotkevitch.

The relevant statistics for this month are:

Contest Statistics:

Both average scores — for users from, and outside India — have increased. This may be due to the decrease in the overall difficulty of the contest’s problems. (That does not overrule the possibility that the average intelligence of the participants was higher. )

Anyway, without further ado, here are your twenty distinct winners for October:

India:

1.   rudradevbasak
2.   pragrame
3.   balakrishnan_v
4.   utkarsh_lath
5.   Johar
6.   architk
7.   rishabhm
8.   theicebreaker
9.   ron
10. gurpreet_09

Rest of the World:

1.    prgobet
2.   nevidomy
3.   anton_lunyov
4.   cgy4ever
5.   raveman
6.   lutyj
7.   fandes
8.   todo
9.   tanzaku
10. abkqz

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 23rd of October. The intensity begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

Midnight greetings, CodeCheffers!

The September Cook-off, in collaboration with Directi’s Go for Gold initiative, and the Amritapuri ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest has concluded, amidst subdued cheers in our office; this was the highest ever participation for a Cook-off, and we have no one to thank for that but all of you, the participants.

Of course, this would never have been possible without our problem setter, the evergreen David Stolp, and our debuting problem tester, Aleksey Tolstikov. Our most sincere gratitude to the both of you for making this possible.

We employed the cluster judging system for this Cook-off, and this ensured its smooth progress throughout the 150-minute duration. Our developers’ were smiling throughout.

Now, to move on to the winners of this special Cook-off:

01. laycurse
02. nevidomy
03. gawry
04. forest
05. ilyakor
06. phinfinity
07. fhlasek
08. Igor Kudryashov
09. Amtrix
10. acube

The final Cook-off rankings can be viewed here.

The statistics for the September Cook-off are as follows:

As you may have noticed, there was a great increase in the Indian number of participants, and this was undeniably because of Amritapuri University’s ACM ICPC regionals warm up contest collaborating with us.

A special mention to laycurse, whose stellar performance in the September and August Cook-offs has enabled him to close the gap between him and first-placed gennady to a hair’s breadth in the short contest rankings. Good to see someone gunning for that top spot!

David Stolp’s editorials can be viewed here.

We look forward to seeing all of you participating in the October 2011 Challenge that begins on 1st October, 2011.

If there is anything you would like to let us know regarding this contest then do let us know by either commenting below this blog post or by sending in an email to feedback@codechef.com.

Cheers,

Adarsh Loyal.