Just quote:

We have given to the students a task to promote algorithms on the web. This is what came up.

Let's share impressions after the contest!

I had a funny moment then 10 minutes before the end my C was failing on assert. This assert means that something wrong compared with naive solution. After unsuccessful attempt to fix it I commented the assert :)

Welcome to the contest of Saratov State U on Petrozavodsk Winter Training Camp 2012-2013. This contest was prepared with diligence and love by jury team of ACM-ICPC NEERC Subregional (Saratov) Contest. Here is the complete list of writers:

• MikeMirzayanov
• Nerevar
• RAD
• e-maxx
• natalia
• NALP
• Dmitry Klenov
• Dmitry Mescheryakov
• Dmitry Stepanenko

Thanks to all of them!

All the authors invite you to take part in the contest virtually in Gym, if:

• You didn't take part in it previously
• You (or your team) is high skilled that you will take part (or took part) on ACM-ICPC World Finals or other high-level competitions. The problemset seems to be hard for not experienced participants.

Hope, you will enjoy the contest!

Contest link: 2012-2013 Petrozavodsk Winter Training Camp, Saratov SU Contest.

Hi everybody!

Have you spent the January as efficiently as we have? Here's a small list of innovations the users can see:

• Now not only the red coders can become coaches. The coders with a yellow handle are now accepted as well, provided that they have taken part in an official Codeforces round no earlier than 6 months ago and have taken part in at least 30 rated Codeforces contests. This innovation roughly doubles the number of potential coaches. So we invite you to check out your new role in the Gym!
• Now it’s absolutely easy to add a Polygon contest to the Trainings. All you need to do is to copy the data from contest.xml from the Polygon system contest interface to contest.xml in the sandbox folder in the Gym (use FTP).
• We’ve added protection against losing data in the Codeforces and Polygon projects’ forms. Now the textareas have a semitransparent ‘Drafts’ button in the upper right corner. You can use it to view or choose some previous versions of the text. The text is saving to drafts automatically. Now if the browser crashes unexpectedly or if you lose the session, that’s not a problem as you will be able to recover your text from the drafts.
• We’ve done some work on introducing the testing message shift from the system to the browser. You can see it on the Status page.The work hasn’t been completed yet and still has some issues, but on the whole it’s a functional system.
• We’ve updated the testlib to 0.8.7: we've boosted the performance of the ensure() function, the readStrictDouble stopped classify more-than-20-digit numbers as invalid, we’ve fixed some compilation warnings and fixed the compilation for some exotic cases.
• The Polygon system has better performance for problems with large manual tests.
• The contest and problem statements in the Polygon system now have reasonable URLs.
• We’ve fixed some bugs caused by cases in some old problems when the standard checker updates automatically, but testlib doesn’t. As a result, the checker cannot be used in such a problem, as it does not compile with the outdated testlib.h. Just in case, we’ve introduced the autoupdate feature for testlib, now updating it is going to be really easy.
• One more Polygon improvement. If a solution is marked as Main or Correct in the Polygon system, but it gets OK on a test in more than half of the time limit, then such situation gets highlighted in the invocations. Similarly, the system highlights the situation when a TL-solution gets TL, but it gets an OK in the double time limit.
• The problem descriptor in the Polygon system got attribute for the sample (example) tests. Now test element has attribute sample="true" value, if it is the test from the statement. This attribute is optional, it its absence is equivalent to sample="false".
• The compilers on judge servers have been updated to modern versions.

Codeforces Testing Round 5 starts on Jan. 12, 2013, 15:00 (UTC). Our goal is to test the platform after recent improvements. You may notice that we've improved real realtime status. You may visit (problemset status)(http://codeforces.com/problemset/status) and find that it updates automatically without page reloadings. It uses modern web realtime technologies like websockets and so on. For sure, no server polling!

Also we've updated server software and built Codeforces with Java 7.

I invite you to take part in the round. It will be Div. 2 + unofficials from Div. 1. It will contain three 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.

Calendar: (c) 2011 Anatoly Rr

The Codeforces project wishes all its users a successful New Year. May all your handles change the colors only towards red, may all your solutions go well without debugging and may you enjoy many times the coveted Accepted at each contest! We wish you good luck in everything you do next year — isn't that great to have luck on your side!

Traditionally, the Codeforces enables the users to change their handles. Note that this is a one-time change and you won't be able to return to the previous handle. Analyze all 'for' and 'against' carefully as the handle is what you are going to be often called by the numerous participants of the Codeforces contests.

We've got more good news. We've decided to increase the list of people who can get the role of the 'coach' in the Codeforces project::training. Check out all those training sessions! Now this role can be given to those who:

• have got the red color handle (i.e. the rating of at least 2200),
• have got the orange color handle, have participated in a Codeforces official contest not more than six months ago and have taken part in at least 30 rated Codeforces contests).

This innovation is going to increase the number of potential coaches roughly by two!

And the last, but not the least detail. Now we can increase the authors' fees for preparing contests. That will hopefully give a little motivation to those who can make an interesting round. In 2013 the authors' fees is:

• preparing a Div.1 + Div.2 round (USD): 250 + 50*,
• preparing a Div.2 round (USD): 100 + 50*.

(We use fixed rate USD = 40 rubles, so actual payment may differ slightly). The sums with asterisks are the extra bonuses the author gets for 'good quality'. The author receives the bonus if he worked without jeopardising the deadlines for preparations and the round went without any major problems with the statements (no additional major notices, fixes in solutions/tests/checkers/validators etc.).

We hope to work with authors efficiently in 2013, we hope that our best participants will generously dazzle the community with interesting contests! For more information or to organize a context, please message Codeforces problem coordinator Gerald (Gerald Agapov).

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

The New Year is in a two-day distance from us and it's good time to summarize the ending year. In a nutshell, this year's been highly productive for the project. Codeforces has set up large championships, rounds followed one after another, we've launched the Codeforces::Gym project, we've added numerous improvements/fixes/innovations. Here's a short list of our deeds:

• when a user votes for a post/comment, his/her authority is taken into consideration, we've introduced anti-bot and froud-detection heuristics
• the Codeforces::Gym has been opened and has come through many improvements
• the Codeforces Markup, based on Markdown has been introduced, accompanied with special Codeforces tags
• Codeforces helped VK.com to carry out a amplitudinous VK Cup 2012 championship which had around 6000 participants!
• the CROC company has used the Codeforces company to carry out the Open Moscow City and Moscow Region Programming Championship, around 1500 participants!
• the ABBYY company has used the Codeforces platform to carry out the ABBYY Cup 2.0 championship, around 2000 participants!
• we've introduced attaching blog posts to contests as announces, tutorials etc.
• we've semiautomatically attached the tutorials for the past contests
• the Bayan company has used the Codeforces platform to carry out the sorting stage of Bayan Programming Contest 2012/13, more than 3000 participants!
• the CROC company has used the Codeforces platform to carry out the CROC Programming Championship among the Bauman MSTU, around 2000 participants!
• the testlib.h has come through numerous improvements
• we've supported new programming languages
• we've supported the dynamic problem complexity
• we've supported inserting photo albums from Picasa to posts
• we've supported interactive problems — despite the short wording, this point is hugely important
• the Polygon project has come through numerous improvements
• we've supported problems with the score in points and with partial solutions (for the marathon type contests)

And that's not the end! We are glad to demonstrate to you wonderful pictures with pleasing graphs and charts.

Northeastern European Regional Contest 2012 will start on December, 2nd. We wish good luck to the teams and many joyful moments to the funs!

Useful links:

• standings
• Petr Mitrichev blog
• Online translation of Awards Ceremony

NCPC (Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest) — the annual programming competition for universities and colleges in the Nordic countries. The event itself is organised in a distributed manner. It is physically hosted at many participating universities and colleges. The same problemset is used at all sites. The scores are gathered electronically, and the result is simultaneous local, national and Nordic championships.

The organizars publish the problems and testdata, special thank you to the organizers.

The contest of this year is available in Codeforces::Gym — 2012 Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC)

It is really good contest as a training before the Subregional or Regional ACM-ICPC contest.

Right now the onsite contest is in progress. You can view the curreny results here.

On Monday you can take part in unofficial contest mirror on http://acm.sgu.ru/. The contest starts on October, 22 (Monday), 2012, 12:00 (UTC). The official results will be integrated into the online contest standings. Hope to see you on [http://acm.sgu.ru/]!

Later the contest will be added as a training in Codeforces::Gym.

Recently the first third team NEERC Trains was finished. By the way, the first place got the intriguing team "SPb NRU ITMO 1: Kever, Korotkevich, Nigmatullin" :-) It was used Warsaw contest from old contest Petrozavodsk camp.

I've added 2007-2008 Petrozavodsk Winter Training Camp, Warsaw Contest to the Gym. The ghosts are not only Petrozavodsk camp participants (2008) but also modern ITMO teams!

Enjoy the contest before ACM-ICPC Subregionals and Regionals contests.

Being recently in the CROC office, I've heard about another interesting contest. It's called "Flying Robots". I am far from robots, but the subject is interesting and popular. I am pleased to publish a small announcement.

About contest

September 3, 2012. CROC, one of the five largest IT companies in Russia, calls for Flying Drone contest applications. The contest is a part of the '20 Ways to Brighten Up Your Life' project. The first prize will be 1 million Rubles.

Contestants shall make a pilotless and autonomous drone which must take off from a starting point, overcome an obstacle, land within a certain zone, take off again and then come back to the starting point. Please submit your application till November 15, 2012. For contest details please visit http://robots.croc.ru/ (in Russian).

Results announcement and award ceremony will take place in August 2013.

About CROC

CROC is a leader in IT infrastructure design and implementation and the number one systems integration service provider in Russia (IDC reports, 2002-2011). CROC is one of the five largest IT companies in Russia (RIA Analytics 2012, Expert Rating Agency 2011) and one of Russia’s Top 200 Private Companies (Forbes).

Hello!

Only few hours left before Codeforces Round # 135 (Div. 2). We are preparing the round in Petrozavodsk where traditional training camp for ACM-ICPC is going now. Today is a day of rest here, many participants gone to a trip to Kizhi. The main contest authors are me and Gerald. Special thanks to Aksenov239 who tested the round. Thank Delinur for translation.

The problems will be sorted by expected difficulty, the scores are dynamic.

Wish you fun round!

There is something to boast. If you count the number of active participants as it TopCoder does (at least one participation in a rated-event in six months), then for Codeforces it is 9389. By the way, TopCoder has a little less, 9380. A trifle, but nice! :)

Distribution by colors:

Hello!

You may find the photos from the VK Cup 2012 on http://vk.com/vkcup