Last Friday, on May 17, CROC finishes the All-Russian Open Programming Championship. The CROC company (together with Codeforces) holds a competition for the best coders of our country for the second year in a row.

Informational technologies are a dynamic habitat where the best minds dwell and sometimes innovative ideas come up at a great speed! This time the organizers stated that the championship is all-Russian but they were surprised to see the championship interest extending beyond the national border.

The interest towards the competition was such that we had many participants from Russia, former Sovyet republics and even far away countries. On this championship, coders solve sports programming problems: to win, they need to come up with effective algorithms, code them quickly, consider all non-typical situations. Besides, there is the additional element of looking for mistakes in other participants' codes and suggest the tests that fail their rivals' codes. The special feature of the contest is the "Code Game Challenge" play round, for which we singled out a special day., — says Sergey Strelkov, the head of the CROC company software development department.

Dmitry Matov from Saratov was humble and skeptical about his chances to win, pointing out the high level of the Championship:

It's the second time I've taken part in the CROC championship. There are few such championships in Russia – you can count the companies that support spots programming like that on the fingers of one hand.

The CROC Championship took part in several stages: it started at the qualification round on April, 13 the internet elimination rounds took place on April, 15 and 22 and finally, the Championship Finals took place in the CROC Moscow office on May, 16 and 17.

The finalists included 3 participants from Belarus, 3 from Ukraine, 3 Polish and one Japanese coder:

The participants of the Finals had pleasant surprises ahead of them. They meet the championship organizers in the CROC innovative office, they went for an excursion to the CROC Data Analysis Centre and took part in an exciting play round:

--- The participants had to implement strategies for hockey teams with a goalkeeper and two players. They had quite little time to write a code that coordinates the players and then compete with other teams. It was interesting and it was fun! — says one of the finalists.

Gennady Korotkievich, a student of St. Petersburg National Information Research Institute of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, won the IT hockey, and the Championship:

It was a challenging competition with challenging problems and challenging participants. That's what makes it interesting for the participants and I guess, for the spectators, too.

Besides, Gennady noted that the CROC Championship for young programmers is a great opportunity to compete with the best young programmers and communicate with people from other cities and even countries. Most of all, this provides the personal growth perspective as well as rising interest to sports programming in Russia.

We remind you that the winner was awarded with 100 000 rubles. Egor Kulikov and Evgeny Kapun, the participants who got the second and third prizes, won 70 000 and 50 000 rubles, correspondingly. The full results are available by this link.

The 2013 Open All-Russia CROC Championship is over. We congratulate the winners but we do not say bye! Look out for the CROC IT news to be among the best. And win!

Hello!

A few hours later, on May 19th at 17:00 MSK, you are lucky to participate in Codeforces Round #184 for Div. 2 participants. Traditionally, Div. 1 participants can take part out of the competition.

Problems have been prepared by: Gridnev Vitaliy (gridnevvvit), Ignatyev Alexander (dudkamaster). It’s our second round and I hope not last. We want to thank Gerald Agapov(Gerald) for help in preparation of this round, Michael Mirzayanov(MikeMirzayanov) for marvelous Codeforces and Polygon systems, Mary Belova(Delinur) for translating the problems.

We hope you will like these problems, and that it will be fun to solve them.

Also we strongly recommend you to read all the problems.

We wish everyone good luck and high rating!

UPD1: Scoring will be standart: 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500.

UPD2: Editorial

UPD3: Congratulations to winners:

1. SillyHook06
2. hyplymac
3. HAPKOMAH

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.