Today it will be Croc Champ 2013 Finals! Good luck to all participants. And to those who don't participate — enjoy the interesting competition.

Yesterday have finished the trial contest and Code Game Challenge. The winner of Code Game Challenge is ... tourist!

Also pay attention to the Croc Champ 2013 - Finals (online version, Div. 1). It will be a rated round. Note: it will be slightly unsual because we will not hide the standings of the official contest. So some information about difficulties of the problems will be known before the round. The contest duration is 2.5 hours.

Good luck to everyone!

The contest has been finished. The winners are:

• tourist
• Egor
• eatmore

Final standings

Actually me and MaximShipko have arrived yesterday.

During this time we, together with CROC staff, had setup 40 computers in the classroom (so it is pity that most of you will use own laptops), installed Code Game Challenge infrastructure and ready to meet the participants.

Soon it will be Croc Champ 2013 - Trial Contest (Finals). Do not worry it some of the website features will be disable, our main goal is to make onsite-event.

Note that today the participants will take part in unofficial entertaining AI-programming contest.

I'll greet all the participants personally, and now I'm sending rays of sadness to the participants, who will not be able to participate today because of the curriculum.

Three drops in a line, back to yellow so quickly ...

Anyway, Codeforces Round #183 will be take place on Sunday, May 12th at 17:00 MSK(21:00 CST). Right after the Google Code Jam Round 1C.

Setters are:

• Yuzhou Gu Sevenkplus (For Problem B && E)
• Yuping Luo roosephu (For Problem A && D)
• Jiatai Huang CMHJT (Problem C)

Testers are WJMZBMR, havaliza, Velicue && me.

We gratefully acknowledge Gerald Agapov(Gerald) for his help in giving advise about the problems, Delinur for her help in translating the problems to Russian, and MikeMirzayanov, who has designed such a powerful platform.

We strongly recommend you to take a glance over all five problems, there must be one suitable to your taste.

Oh one more thing, this time, scoring will be dynamic, but problems are sorted by increasing order of their difficulty as usual.

Good Luck!

Testing Round #6 starts on May 11, 2013, 20:00 (UTC). Our goal is to test the platform after recent improvements. All of them are in the Codeforces backend, but they affect many lines of the code.

I invite you to take part in the round. It will be Div. 2 + unofficials from Div. 1. It will contain four-five obsolescent problems. But I think it will be interesting for many of you. The problems contain very weak pretests to force more hacks. It will be unrated round.

Many thanks to participants!

P.S. As it is testing round, we do not guarantee stable work and so on.

Hooray! Yupee! We have finished the complex me-Cormen-ralekseenkov logistic combination and now are ready to pay tribute to the heroes of 2012. This year (thanks, Thomas!) the Cormen Medal laureates are going to get a new Thomas Cormen book "Algorithms Unlocked", signed by the author in addition to the medal, glory and fame!

The 2012 Cormen Medal laureates are:

• tourist (Gennady Korotkevich) — Codeforces Best Coder 2012
  Gennady keeps his first place in the Codeforces rating, continues participating actively and at this point the third place in the round isn’t always a rating improvement for him. We wish Gennady more victories, especially considering that the ACM-ICPC 2013 Finals are so soon!
• witua (Vitaliy Herasymiv) — Codeforces Best Problemsetter 2012
  In 2012 Vitaly dazed us with his interesting problems many times. Due to him, we are experts on all sorts of lucky number and Little Elephant properties. Thanks to Vitaly for the great problems!
• Nickolas (Mariia Mykhailova) — Codeforces Spirit of Community 2012
  Maria, the author of unusual rounds, an active blogger of 2012, has received a new nomination. Maria’s ideas, bright and out-of-the-box, have made the live of the community more diverse and fun.
• I_love_ilona (Alexander Kouprin) – Codeforces Best Blogger 2012
  We all love reading Alex Kouprin’s stories from all sorts of 2012 sports programming events.

Let us remind you that it’s the third year when the Cormen medals has been awarded. It’s the third year when [tourist] has become the best coder and I_love_ilona — the best blogger twice in a row. My favorite nomination, "Codeforces best problemsetter" went to natalia (Natalia Bondarenko) in 2010, and to Ripatti Artem Ripatti in 2011.

We do hope that the last year laureates will amaze us with their talents on in 2013.

Hi, everyone!

We are happy to announce the results of ABBYY programming problem contest! Congratulations to the winners:

The winners who have sent several problems must be wondering which problem has brought them to victory. You can ask me this question personally by message or by e-mail.

We want to make a present to each of the participants! Please choose one of our products for personal use and let us know about it by e-mail. Winners can choose two products: )

Also we want to invite all the winners to the ABBYY Open day which will take place in ABBYY’s Moscow office. A compensation format will be individually discussed with the participants by email.

ABBYY Cup 3.0 is now supposed to consist of two parts: an online-part (in the beginning of June) and an onsite-part (in the middle of July).

And for now we are waiting for ABBYY Cup 3.0 official announcement!

Hello everyone!

Codeforces Round #182 will take place on Sunday, May 5th at 19:30 MSK. This is my sixth Codeforces round and I hope not the last.

I'd like to thank Gerald and sdya for helping me to prepare the round. Special thanks to Delinur for translation of all problem statements into English.

I strongly recommend you to read ALL the problems.

Gl & hf ! :)

Because of technical issue the start of the contest was unsuccessful. Sorry about it. The contest will be UNRATED.

Tutorial.

As you probably know there are International Workers' Day holidays in Russia in the beginning of May. Am I the only person who see a contradiction here? Workers and continuous holydays!

So I decided that the best way to spend May, 2nd is to do something useful. So meet new languages on Codeforces:

• Python 3 (3.3.1)
• MS C# .NET 4
• Go (1.1 RC1)

Also I made an attempt to setup Clojure, but his AOT nature makes any solution (even A+B) to run for at least 1 second :( I believe it is possible to precompile Clojure solution into bytecode, but I haven't found the way yet. Maybe someone can help me?

There are three days before round. Three days to test new languages. Please write comments in case of any issues.

P.S. As extra bonus — I've updated Python 2 to 2.7.4.

Hello everybody,

Just in two days annual Ural Sports Programming Championship is going to begin. More than 300 participants, coaches, organizers and guests from different corners of Russia and from abroad will gather in Ekaterinburg for this bright event.

On the 1st of May Battle of the Giants is going to happen: 5 best teams from Russia and 5 from China are going to attack problems, prepared by Poland team.

Why is it that way and how it all began — here .

The main contest of the Championship is going to happen on the 3rd of May. This year we expecting 20 teams-participants of ACM ICPC World Finals 2013, 5 of them are coming from China and 2 — from Poland. Also, there going to be 11 veteran teams.

By the way, you can watch how things go on the floor both in english and russian languages. Join live video broadcast and watch your favorite team!

On April 6th, III (XIV) Volga Region Open Team Student Programming Contest was held in Samara State University. And now, we invite everyone who haven't already participated in the championship to join the Codeforces training contest version on April 28th (11:00 — 16:00 MSK, UTC+4). We believe that participants of any level will find problems that will be interesting for them. The contest will probably be mostly interesting to participants with violet and orange levels (difficulty is 4 stars).

This contest uses ACM ICPC rules. Use text files input.txt and output.txt instead of stdin/stdout.

Please, do not use the Internet, prewritten code and other sources: participants of the championship could not use any of these.

Contest was prepared by Dmitry Matov (Nerevar), Constantine Drozdov (I_love_natalia), Andrey Gaidel (Shlakoblock), Elena Rogacheva (elena), Sergei Shteiner (steiner), Dmitry Novikov, Alexander Efimov, Gennady Gutman.