Welcome to Codeforces Beta Round #25 (Div. 2)

Authors of today's round problems are Mike Mirzayanov and me. I want to thank to Dmitry Levshunov for technical assistance in organizing the contest, as well as Gerald Agapov and Nikolay Kuznetsov for writing alternative solutions.

I wish you all good luck!

Task A

• Problems
• Final Standings
• Winner: dzhulgakov

• Problems
• Final standings
  
• Winner: saeedreza.seddighin

Contest discussion

Problem А. Second Order Statistics

Sorting

In this problem one should find a minimal element from all elements, that are strictly greater, then the minimal one or report that it doesn't exist. Of course, there can be a lot of different solutions, but one of the simplest - to sort the given sequence and print the first element, that's not equal to the previous. If all elements are equal, then the required element doesn't exist.

Welcome all to Codeforces Beta Round #22

Note that at this time registration is possible during the round. The contest will begin at 19:00 MSK.

Today I am an author of the problems. I would like to thank Mike Mirzayanov for help in contest preparations, Edvard Davtyan and Nickolay Kuznetsov for writing the verification solutions, and Julia Satushina for translating statements into English.

Good luck on the contest!

UPD: The contest is over. Thank you all for participating!
Problems
Results
Winner Kasparyanm_Mihail gains +203 to rating after the contest!

Authors of today's contest are Artem Rakhov and me. Thanks to Mike Mirzayanov, Edvard Davtyan and Julia Satushina for help in the organisation.

I hope, you will have fun.

Good luck!

P.S. After start of the contest, you can download the statements:

English

Russian

UPD. The contest has finished and you can see the standings and tasks. The winner and only participant who has solved all the problems is kalinov. Congratulations!

You may read complete rules here.

The text contains only preliminary rules of Codeforces contests — something surely will change. In particular, I hope to help the community to find the illogic in the rules. However, I have already discussed the format with programming contests dinosaurs and made unrated alpha contests — it seems rules are OK.

I think than the format 5 tasks x 2 hour is quite good. For this reason, in the near future we will not change it, but of course, experiments are possible.

1. Before the competition all participants are divided into rooms, each room contains about 20 participants. For now random strategy works, but after a while it will be somehow correlated with the rating.