Hello!
Informal contest Codeforces Testing Round #2 is scheduled on 10/29/2011 01:00PM (UTC). We will test the latest innovations on Codeforces that they do not affect the contests. If not, we will fix it quickly :) So, this round will take place "as is", no warranty about it.
Problems for the round may be famous to someone, but I'll try to make them such not for any of you. It will be about 4 problems, as quite simple and something more tricky.
I say thanks in advance to all those who will come and test the system. Thank you!
The contest moved to start on 10/29/2011 01:00PM (UTC) (it has been announced to start on other time, be careful).
It will be unrated round.
Thank you all for your help. I think it turned out pretty fun for you and useful for us!
MikeMirzayanov
Hello!
Wellcome to Codeforces Beta Round #91! This time, the author of the round will be me, Herasymiv Vitaliy (witua). Thanks a lot to Artem Rakhov (RAD) for helping in round preparing and Maria Belova for problems translation. I hope you will like problems.
Good luck!
Thanks all! And here are the winners:
Division 1:
Hello!
Today, October 23 (Sunday) at 08:00 (UTC) will begin online contest based on recently completed ACM-ICPC NEERC Southern Subregional Programming Contest 2011. Two days ago a competition was held in Saratov (hosted by Saratov State University), but today you can participate in it informally. Onsite participants will in the standings, to give you an oppotunity to compare your results with onsite teams. The statements will be available as a PDF-file and in HTML. To participate, go to the site http://acm.sgu.ru.
After the contest, you may discuss here the problems. I hope you'll like them.
Chairman of the Jury,
MikeMirzayanov
The X regional school team programming contest will be held in Saratov on Tuesday, 18 of October. The jury has prepared a set of interesting problems. We came to conclusion that it will be unfair if these tasks are available only for the onsite school teams. That's why we decided to organize a contest with these tasks on Codeforces.
The contest was prepared by members of the best teams of the Saratov State University: Gerald Agapov, Polina Bondarenko, Ivan Fefer, Artem Rakhov, Nickolay Kuznetsov, Edvard Davtyan, Pavel Kholkin and Igor Kudryashov, as well as by our "veterans": Natalia Bondarenko, Michael Mirzayanov and me, Dmitry Matov. Maria Belova also did an excellent job and translated the statements into English.
Enjoy the contest!
The statements will be available as PDF via links:
It will be file input-output in these problems. Read statements carefully.
Hello everyone!
Welcome to the Codeforces Beta Round #90! I (Sergey Sukhov) and Alexander Ignatyev (dudkamaster) have prepared for you today's contest. We thank Artem Rakhov (RAD) for help and useful hints, Mariya Belova (Delinur) for translation of statements, as well as Michael Mirzayanov (MikeMirzayanov) for opportunity to conduct this round.
Good luck and high rating!
My further narration becomes less sequential and consistent than the first part. This is mostly due to the fact that competition rounds themselves are covered in the official blog (not to mention that I haven't followed all of them from start to finish), so I'll focus on the interesting things which were happening between the rounds, after them and sometimes even instead of them :-)
At the end of July TopCoder Studio ran a contest to get some ideas of how to entertain people at the onsites. The voting for the ideas had a very poor interface (I wonder whether there was a single person who has read all the ideas before voting?), but still it allowed to choose four ideas:
Hello World.
The next Codeforces round is prepared by me. This is my debut in arranging contests. I invite everyone to participate in the second division. I hope that all goes well. I wish you have a nice time and be able to improve your skills in programming.
Thanks to Artem Rakhov (RAD), and Mike Mirzayanov (MikeMirzayanov) for preparation of the round and for motivation.
Good luck and high rating!
"div 2"
TCO11 - is the second (and hopefully not the last) finals I've visited as a blogger. I hope that not everybody here followed the official blog, and thus my story of this trip will be read as an original art work :-)
Day -1. Arrival
I arrived one day earlier than most of the finalists, on Friday evening local time. How does one do this? Long story short, you just don't rely on Barbara's choice, and (when filling travel info) write something like "I like this flight, and I'm in SWISS mileage program, and I absolutely love Zürich". Disclaimer: if everybody uses this hack, it might stop working, so beware.
Last time I mentioned, that one of the winners of the 'best event for participants' competition was a girl, who offered participants to take pictures based on tasks like "take a picture of yourself and <description of other person> doing <description of setting>". Even though that is a really awesome event, very few people were interested in it, which was very sad.
TopCoder Open 2011 keeps going.
Yesterday we were supposed to hold a poker tournament with a grand prize MacBook Air. There were a lot of people willing to participate, which forced us to split the tournament into two elimination rounds and one final. Out of 16 people who registered for the tournament, 8 were russian-speaking, and all of them appeared to be in the same elimination round. Petr and MikhaelOK advanced from that round, while 7ania7 and theycallhimtom advanced from another one, which was non-russian-speaking. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the elimination rounds, however, we played more poker that day, in the same place, so this picture gives you pretty good understanding of how it looked like (during the elimination round it was a little bit more crowded though):
Last time I didn't publish any pictures of a hotel, except one view out of the window. The hotel is called The Westin Diplomat.
It is located in a Hollywood city. The city is in 20 minutes of driving from Miami, however it looks like a small village with a lot of palms. The hotel looks weird in such a setting, since essentially it is 36-storey skyscraper. It is located right next to the Ocean shore, such that the moment you leave the hotel, you find yourself on the beach.