DrSwad's blog

By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 17 of MathMash tomorrow at 17: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Snpushpita, Joydip, thanicsamin, rah4920 and DrSwad.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-1000-1250-1500-1750-2000-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration deadline has been removed from the contests. So now, you can register at any time before the contest ends.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 16 of MathMash tomorrow at 17: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Snpushpita, Joydip, thanicsamin, rah4920 and DrSwad.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1250-1500-2000-2000-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration ends at 10 minutes after the start of the contest.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 14 of MathMash tomorrow at 17: 00 UTC. The round will be based on team selection test for ARML. It has been prepared by Benq.

The round will consist of 10 problems, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-500-750-750-1000-1500-2000-2000-2500-2500

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration ends at 10 minutes after the start of the contest.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 13 of MathMash tomorrow at 14: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1000-1500-1500-2000-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration ends at 10 minutes after the start of the contest.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 12 of MathMash tomorrow at 14: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1000-1500-1750-2000-2500-3500

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration ends at 10 minutes after the start of the contest.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 11 of MathMash tomorrow at 14: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1000-1500-1750-2000-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.


A few details about the contest:

  • In order to participate in the contest, you need to register first. Kindly follow this link to do so. Registration ends at 10 minutes after the start of the contest.

  • I know this announcement is being placed in a coding website, but unfortunately using computer programs for MathMash contests is not allowed. We are trying to reward users' math skills with high ratings as there are not many sites that do this yet. We also try our best to set up the problems in such a way that any trivial brute force approach isn't supposed to work (for the mediocre/difficult problems).

  • Time-penalty is applicable for the contest: Each problem is given an appropriate number of points, which will be visible when the round starts. Participants will gain that many points — the time penalty after successfully submitting to a particular problem. The later the problem submission occurs, the more points being deducted due to time penalty.

  • The round is rated; which means that if you participate in the contest, your rating will be updated at the end of the round based on your rank in it. But you won't be considered as participating in the round if you don't submit any answer at all, even if you're registered for the contest.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 10 of MathMash today at 12: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-1000-1250-1750-2000-2250-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 9 of MathMash today at 13: 30 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

Points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1000-1500-1750-2000-2500-2500.

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 8 of MathMash today at 16: 10 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

The points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-750-1000-1500-2000-2500-3000.

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 7 of MathMash tomorrow at 13: 00 UTC. The round has been prepared by Anachor, neutron-byte, DrSwad and Snpushpita.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

The points distribution for the problems will be added soon.

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

PS: We have added a new private chatting feature for our users. I've also written a post about it on MathMash. We will be adding images and latex equations support soon in the chats. I'll be really glad to hear your thoughts and any suggestions you may have about it.

PPS: I checked all the coding platforms yesterday and tomorrow's CF round was not added yet back then. I've rescheduled our round so that it ends before the CF one.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 6 of MathMash today at 13: 00 UTC. This is the first time that our users will be collaborating a whole new round for us. Our top ranked user rkm0959 and MNJ2357 have put a lot of effort in the past few days setting up this contest and we're really thankful to them.

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

The points distribution for the problems are decided as 500-750-1000-1500-2000-2500-2500-3000

We're inviting you all to join us in the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm glad to announce that we will be having Round 5 of MathMash tomorrow at 15: 00 UTC. We didn't have many contests this week on the platform, due to the national Informatics Olympiad held yesterday in our country. Everyone was busy preparing for the olympiad. So now that being dealt with, hopefully we'll be having more contests in the following weeks :)

The round will consist of 8 problems, as usual, to be solved within 2 hours.

The points distribution for the problems are decided as 500, 750, 1000, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 2500

We're inviting you all to join the contest. Hopefully we'll have a fun and successful round.

PS: We'd like to invite more collaborations in the problem setters team to help us set up more interesting problems for the contests. Six awesome people from Codeforces have already offered us their help :) I am really thankful to them. If you're willing to help us out, kindly PM me.

PPS: I couldn't really perform in the olympiad as per the expectations :( 6'th place which kind of sounds cool but actually isn't considering the time invested. Although it could go far worse.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

We will be having Round 3 and 4 of MathMash today and tomorrow respectively, both at 15:00 UTC.

The rounds will consist of 8 problems to be solved within 2 hours.

The points distribution for today's round are decided as follows for now: 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 2500, 3500.

You're all invited to join the contests. Hopefully we'll have some fun and successful rounds.

PS: We need more collaborators in the problem setters team to help us set up more interesting problems. Four awesome people from Codeforces have already offered us their help :) I am really thankful to them. If you're willing to help us out, kindly PM me.

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

We will be hosting the second contest of MathMash today at 1:00 PM (UTC). The round will consist of 10 problems to be solved within 2 hours.

We have learned a lot from our previous contest and hope to use that experience to better organize this one. We didn't expect so many users solving so many problems that quickly. So we added more problems and tried to increase the difficulty of the higher problems a bit.

Also the time-penalty seemed to cost too high considering the actual number of points rewarded for a problem. So we will be increasing the score for each problem in this round.

There was an issue in the contest page which has been fixed now. You won't be rated for the contest even if you are registered but don't submit any answer(also if you don't register you can't submit any answer till the contest ends). And the limit of 20 submissions per problem seemed too high, it has been reduced to 10 now.

I'm also working on a clarification section in the contest page, so that users can ask for any clarification for any problem. Hopefully it'll be ready before the contest. If not, then it'll have to wait for the next round to serve us.

I'm inviting you all to participate in the contest. Hopefully we will have a fun and successful round.

Update: I didn't notice that the previous schedule overlapped with a csa round. I've updated it so that our contest ends before the csa round starts.

Update 2: I feel really sad writing this. The site looks promising, but the timing could not have been worse. With the public exams of my country so near, I am awfully busy trying not to fail(and this exam is really important in my country). It's literally getting impossible to squeeze out more than 2 hours per day to work on the site now, which I need to spend on improving the platform rather than setting up problems. The current admins(my friends) will also be taking that exam. So the site really begs for some collaboration from others to set up the problems for future contests.

From my experience of the last two contests, the whole process of setting up a contest goes as follows:

  1. We first work on finding some "not obvious to code" but interesting and not well-known problems which could be set as the 2000+ points problems for the round. This step requires a lot of time, as we try to avoid getting into trouble for using any National or International Olympiad problems just to be safe and thus have to go really deep looking for these problems. Then we collect the 500-1500 points problems mostly focusing on if they are interesting and appealing rather than if they are vulnerable to codes.

  2. After that we go through the solution of each of the selected problems to verify if the problems and their answers are correct.

  3. There's not much work to do while the contest runs. But when it ends, writing up the editorial takes up a lot of time and effort too.

We were really determined to regularly host contests in every 2 or 3 days interval. But if we can't manage some help now, there might unfortunately be a month-long break in contests.

Till now three awesome people from Codeforces offered to collaborate on the site. But each of the 3 steps above needs more people(particularly step 1). If you would like to join us you can select one or more of the above steps that you would like to collaborate on and kindly
— Find me on Telegram [Username: DrSwad] (most preferred way)
— or find me on Facebook [Username: nayeemulislam.swad]
— or PM me here on Codeforces

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By DrSwad, 6 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces!

I'm here to announce the release of MathMash!

It's a Math contest platform pretty similar to Codeforces in contest structure. Each user is given an initial rating of 1000 and it's updated after the end of a contest that the user participated in, based on his rank in the contest.

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