Hi Codeforces!

I'm excited to announce the Forethought Future Cup! It will consist of two rounds, an online round on April 20th, 11:05am PDT, and an onsite round on May 4th, 10:05am PDT. Both of these rounds will be rated and open for all participants. The top 25 local contestants near San Francisco will be invited to the Forethought office to take part onsite.

Each round will be a combined round. In the first round, there will be 8 problems in 2.5 hours. There will be at least one interactive problem in this round. Please read the interactive problem guide if you haven’t already.

The problems in this round were all written by me. Thanks to ismagilov.code, mohammedehab2002, Jeel_Vaishnav, Learner99, dojiboy9, fortune, y0105w49, KAN, arsijo for testing and coordination. Of course, thanks to MikeMirzayanov for Codeforces and Polygon, and for allowing us to host the round.

Prizes

T-shirts will be awarded to all onsite participants. 25 shirts will also be randomly awarded to contestants in the elimination round with ranks 1 to 250. The onsite round will also have some monetary prizes:

• First: $500
• Second: $250
• Third: $100
• 4th — 10th: $50

About Forethought:

At Forethought, our mission is to use AI technology to augment human abilities and make everyone “a genius at their job”. Our main product is Agatha, an assistant that helps customer support agents answer cases more quickly and confidently by suggesting answers and triaging cases. We've raised over $10M in VC funding and were the winners of 2018 SF TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

I joined Forethought back in December 2018. We are a small 12 person startup, and have a lot of competitive programmers on our team, including me, y0105w49, fortune, and dojiboy9 (our CEO, who is also an ICPC World Finals Judge). I’m happy to answer any questions about working here in the comments below or through PM.

We’re hiring! Please fill out this form if you are interested.

Updates

UPD 1 The scoring distribution will be 500-1000-1500-2250-2500-3250-3250-3750

UPD 2 Tutorial can be found here: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/66639

Hi, Codeforces!

Codeforces Round #553 (Div. 2) will be held on Apr/18/2019 18:35 (Moscow time). Round will be rated for second division (rating below 2100). As usual, participants from the first division can participate in the contest out of competition.

My gratitude to arsijo and KAN for coordinating the round, Markellonchik (special thanks for the help in preparing one of the tasks), mohammedehab2002, Jeel_Vaishnav for testing, and also 300iq for the idea and preparation of one of the tasks, aleks5d and isaf27 for testing it, and of course MikeMirzayanov for Codeforces and Polygon systems.

In this round you will help the residents of the Kingdom of Kremland. I strongly recommend you to read the statements of ALL tasks (and of course, try to solve them).

Good luck!

UPD: Scoring distribution: 500-750-1250-1750-2250-2750.

UPD: Editorial

UPD: Thank you for your participation in this round! Congratulations to the winners!

Div. 2

1. square1001
2. hitonanode
3. jaguar1996
4. BoogieCy
5. sansen

This time I have nothing to say except that this round will consist of 7 different problems!

<almost-copy-pasted-part>

Hello! Codeforces Round #552 (Div. 3) will start at Apr/16/2019 17:35 (Moscow time). You will be offered 6 or 7 problems (or 8) with expected difficulties to compose an interesting competition for participants with ratings up to 1600. Probably, participants from the first division will not be at all interested by this problems. And for 1600-1899 the problems will be too easy. However, all of you who wish to take part and have rating 1600 or higher, can register for the round unofficially.

The round will be hosted by rules of educational rounds (extended ACM-ICPC). Thus, during the round, solutions will be judged on preliminary tests, and after the round it will be a 12-hour phase of open hacks. I tried to make strong tests — just like you will be upset if many solutions fail after the contest is over.

You will be given 6 or 7 (or 8) problems and 2 hours to solve them.

Note that the penalty for the wrong submission in this round (and the following Div. 3 rounds) is 10 minutes.

Remember that only the trusted participants of the third division will be included in the official standings table. As it is written by link, this is a compulsory measure for combating unsporting behavior. To qualify as a trusted participants of the third division, you must:

• take part in at least two rated rounds (and solve at least one problem in each of them),
• do not have a point of 1900 or higher in the rating.

Regardless of whether you are a trusted participant of the third division or not, if your rating is less than 1600, then the round will be rated for you.

Thanks to MikeMirzayanov for the platform, help with ideas for problems and for coordination of my work. Thanks to my good friends Mikhail PikMike Piklyaev, Maksim Ne0n25 Mescheryakov and Ivan BledDest Androsov for help in round preparation and testing the round.

Good luck!

I also would like to say that participants who will submit wrong solutions on purpose and hack them afterwards (example) will not be shown in the hacking leaders table.

</almost-copy-pasted-part>

UPD: Thanks to le.mur for idea of one of the problems.

UPD2: Editorial is published now!

UPD3:

Congratulations to the winners:

Congratulations to the best hackers:

And finally people who were the first to solve each problem:

Hi Codeforces!

We are glad to invite you to our first Codeforces Round Codeforces Round #551 (Div. 2) which will be held on Apr/13/2019 17:05 (Moscow time). This round will be rated for participants with rating less than 2100. We will be glad to see participants from the first division to join out of competition as well!

In this round, as the best friend of Serval's, you are going to help him to solve the problems he meets.

The problems are prepared by bzh and me. We hope you will enjoy the round. :P

Great thanks to 300iq for coordination of this round, isaf27, gritukan, KAN, mohammedehab2002, learner99, aleks5d and Um_nik for testing our rounds, and MikeMirzayanov for the amazing Codeforces and Polygon platforms.

You will be given 6 problems to solve in 2 hours. Scoring distribution will be announced later.

Please pay attention that there will be an interactive problem in this round, so learn more about interactive problems here before the contest.

Good luck & Have fun! :D

UPD: Scoring distribution is: 500-1000-1500-1750-2250-2750.

UPD2: Thank you for your participation in this round! Congratulations to the winners!

Div. 2

1. ihdignite
2. NiroBC
3. waaaaadreamer
4. kidddddddddddddddddddddd
5. xianhaoming
6. __Ressed__
7. nikolapesic2802
8. xiaowuc1
9. ei133333
10. Kho0007

Div. 1 + Div. 2

1. ihdignite
2. kefaa2
3. NiroBC
4. uwi
5. step_by_step
6. waaaaadreamer
7. mmmod_lqs
8. teja349
9. RDDCCD
10. quailty

UPD3: Sorry for the delay. The editorial is available.

Hi!

At Apr/06/2019 14:35 (Moscow time) we will host Codeforces Global Round 2.

It is the second round of a new series of Codeforces Global Rounds supported by XTX Markets. The rounds are open for everybody, the rating will be updated for everybody.

The prizes for this round:

• 30 best participants get a t-shirt.
• 20 t-shirts are randomly distributed among those with ranks between 31 and 500, inclusive.

The prizes for the 6-round series in 2019:

• In each round top-100 participants get points according to the table.
• The final result for each participant is equal to the sum of points he gets in the four rounds he placed the highest.
• The best 20 participants over all series get sweatshirts and place certificates.

The problems of this round were developed by a team of authors: 300iq, cyand1317, Aleks5d, RDDCCD, KAN, gen.

Thanks KAN for his help in the round's coordination, and also isaf27, lewin, osaaateiasavtnl., Errichto, arsijo, _kun_ for testing the round!

Удачи!

Congratulations the winners!

1) ecnerwala

2) tourist

3) Um_nik

4) Endagorion

5) Petr

Editorial.

ICPC World Finals 2019 will begin on April 4, 2019 at 11:00 (UTC). This event is the main event of the year in the world of sports programming!

In the past 20 years alone, ICPC participation has increased by more than 2000%. The contest evolved into its present form as a multi-tier competition in 1977, with the first finals held in conjunction with the ACM Computer Science Conference. Last year, ICPC Regional participation included 52,709 of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines from 3,233 universities in 110 countries. We remind you that in the current world champion is the team of Moscow State University.

Codeforces wishes the teams to show a vivid and interesting contest. We wish to find beautiful solutions, write without bugs and enjoy many accepted problems!

Links:

• Current results
• Official website of the championship
• ICPC News (photo, video about the Finals)
• ICPC Live (broadcast and not only)
• List of the Teams (with Codeforces handles)
• Online Mirror Contest

Hey all!

We'll be running ICPC Connections this year at World Finals! ICPC Connections is powered by Lunchclub and is a way for contestants, coaches, and alums at World Finals to get to meet one another. We first ran Lunchclub at ICPC last year (thanks M.Mahdi for the shoutout!) and are excited to be back.

If you're in Porto this week and would be interested to meet fellow attendees, sign up at lunchclub.ai/icpc! And if you're curious to learn more about what we're working on, check out our main product here :)

The contest is over; I hope at least some of you enjoyed it :-) The editorial is published here.

The 7th April Fools Day Contest will take place on Monday April 1st. This is a joke competition in which solving the problem is often easier than figuring out what the actual task is.

In this round you'll be given several weird problems and 2 hours to solve them. The contest will use ACM ICPC rules (no hacks, the standings are decided by the number of solved problems and penalty time earned on them), and it will be unrated. You can submit solutions in any language allowed by Codeforces. To get an idea of what the contest will look like, you can check out the contests of the past years: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018.

As usual, to enjoy competing in this round you'll need a sense of humor compatible with mine. Good luck, and have fun!

Hello! Hope you missed me :) As far as some people say, because of copy-pasted announcement this round wouldn't be interesting. But the real thing is that I'm very sick now and I'm very glad that I prepared this round at all. Hope you will enjoy it. Good luck to all!

<copy-pasted-part>

Hello! Codeforces Round #550 (Div. 3) will start at Mar/31/2019 17:05 (Moscow time). You will be offered 6 or 7 problems (or 8) with expected difficulties to compose an interesting competition for participants with ratings up to 1600. Probably, participants from the first division will not be at all interested by this problems. And for 1600-1899 the problems will be too easy. However, all of you who wish to take part and have rating 1600 or higher, can register for the round unofficially.

The round will be hosted by rules of educational rounds (extended ACM-ICPC). Thus, during the round, solutions will be judged on preliminary tests, and after the round it will be a 12-hour phase of open hacks. I tried to make strong tests — just like you will be upset if many solutions fail after the contest is over.

You will be given 6 or 7 (or 8) problems and 2 hours to solve them.

Note that the penalty for the wrong submission in this round (and the following Div. 3 rounds) is 10 minutes.

Remember that only the trusted participants of the third division will be included in the official standings table. As it is written by link, this is a compulsory measure for combating unsporting behavior. To qualify as a trusted participants of the third division, you must:

• take part in at least two rated rounds (and solve at least one problem in each of them),
• do not have a point of 1900 or higher in the rating.

Regardless of whether you are a trusted participant of the third division or not, if your rating is less than 1600, then the round will be rated for you.

Thanks to MikeMirzayanov for the platform, help with ideas for problems and for coordination of my work. Thanks to my good friends Mikhail PikMike Piklyaev, Maksim Ne0n25 Mescheryakov and Ivan BledDest Androsov for help in round preparation and testing the round.

Good luck!

I also would like to say that participants who will submit wrong solutions on purpose and hack them afterwards (example) will not be shown in the hacking leaders table.

</copy-pasted-part>

UPD: Editorial is published!

UPD2:

Congratulations to the winners:

Congratulations to the best hackers:

And finally people who were the first to solve each problem: