Hello, Codeforces!

I am pleased to invite you to participate in Codeforces Round sponsored by NEAR (Div. 1 + Div. 2), which will be held at Jul/18/2024 17:35 (Moscow time). You will be given 9 problems and 2 hours and 30 minutes to solve them. It will be rated for all participants.

The theme of the round is computer games!

Tasks for the round were prepared by EJIC_B_KEDAX, zwezdinv, green_gold_dog, molney, azureglow and Sokol080808.

We would like to thank everyone who assisted in the preparation of this round:

1. Our coordinator 74TrAkToR for his useful advices and help in preparing the tasks!

2. Qwerty1232 for red interest in testing the round.

3. turmax for the red-black testing.

4. makrav, arbuzick, Anonymous_Noob, Hyperbolic for red testing.

5. [user:ivan. alexeev], alenenok, Kihihihi, azureglow, pakhomovee, plagues, IzhtskiyTimofey, FelixArg, XaRDKoDblCH, meowcneil, AndreyPavlov, djm03178, MylnikovNikolay for yellow testing.

6. Mr_Ell, krigare, marzipan, TimVen74, coder8080, MichsSS, PieArmy, tvladm, Vladosiya, bashem for purple testing.

7. Algolagon, PoDuReMaN, zarubin, IgorA, leoper, kovir_aleksey_korroy, Kosya, Vamperox for blue testing.

8. MakGeoKar, viteli for cyan testing.

9. Sonya_2009, ishaandas1 for green testing.

10. MikeMirzayanov for the excellent Codeforces and Polygon systems.

I also congratulate green_gold_dog on his birthday and wish him good luck on IOI.

This round is supported by NEAR!

NEAR was founded in 2017 by Illia Polosukhin, one of the creators of Transformers, and Alex Skidanov as an attempt to build an artificial system capable of solving competitive programming problems. You can read more about that attempt here.

Ultimately, NEAR pivoted into building a blockchain protocol, which it launched in 2020.

This year, NEAR started NEAR.AI, a new lab with a mission to build AI systems that are open and available to everyone, instead of being controlled by a few mega-corporations.

One of the areas of focus is making models capable of reasoning reliably, and for that, competitive programming problems provide a great environment. To help us build it, we invite all members of the Codeforces community with a rating of Specialist or higher (1400+) to help us annotate step-by-step explanations of solutions to competitive programming problems. We want to annotate a very large set of problems of all difficulty levels, and pay relatively high rewards in NEAR per annotation. You can join the system following this: https://codeforces.com/settings/near-connect-account

Thanks to NEAR for providing the following prizes to the contestants:

• 1st place: 512 Ⓝ;
• 2nd and 3rd places: 256 Ⓝ each;
• 4th to 7th places: 128 Ⓝ each;
• and so on;
• 512th to 1023th places: 1 Ⓝ each.

Good luck!