Hello, Codeforces.

Unfortunately, we have to declare the round unrated.

Absolutely, these are not issues of the side of Codeforces code, but rather it is a hardware issue. Probably, electricity, power unit or something else. This led to unexpected repeated reboots of the server with the database. I hope that we will be able to quickly deal with this.

We apologize to the writers of the round and its participants.

P.S. Please, do not downvote the round announcement: the writers are not to blame for what happened. And in general, this time it is difficult to blame someone. Sometimes hardware fails.

Mike.

But why not!

Many people here seem to know me. Or maybe not quite? I am ready to answer your questions. Ask me anything! I plan to spend no more than 3 hours on answers. Sorry if I can't answer all the questions.

Let's more or less follow the rules from here https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/wiki/index

Below is actually a quote from the rules.

The interviewee begins the process by starting a post, describing who they are and what they do. Then commenters from across the internet leave questions and can vote on other questions according to which they would like to see answered.

The interviewee can go through and reply to the questions they find interesting and easily see those questions the internet is dying to have the answer to.

Because the internet is asking the questions, they're going to be a mix of serious and lighthearted, and you'll find yourself sharing all kinds of things you won't find in a normal interview.

Comments will be removed under a few circumstances:

• Abusive or harassing comments.
• Requests for personal favors from the OP (For example, "OP, can you send me a signed autograph").
• Top-level comments must ask a question.
• Comments where there would be no possibility of a real answer, especially where it is deliberately creepy or offensive.
• "I bet OP won't answer this"-type responses, which usually come after the OP has finished responding to questions.
• "Fluff," non-contributing responses from users, responding to all of the OP's comments for karma/attention.
• Repeatedly asking the same question.

Please, don't attempt to bypass the rules by adding a ? to a nonquestion.

Questions must be directed toward the individual(s) doing the IAMA.

Under our policies, astroturfing is the practice of an individual or group of individuals who plant questions in an IAmA post for a particular purpose. This kind of behavior is forbidden.

UPD 1: Oh, I'm kind of tired of doing this. Please keep asking questions. Tomorrow I will answer again. Don't forget to vote for the most interesting ones. I will not have time to answer everything, I will choose something. Thanks!

UPD 2:

Hi.

Here is the list of top-voted blog posts in 2021. Find something interesting for yourself?

Hey!

Are you celebrating the New Year already? I wish you a Happy New Year. I wish you progress, joy and health.

We decided to show the current progress in the catalog of significant Codeforces posts.

So far, quite a bit has been implemented, but somehow you can already use it! Would you like to see it? Follow the link:

As planned, the catalog will collect and classify interesting and useful posts from Codeforces. Indeed, many useful articles have been written in Codeforces over 12 years (God, already 12 years!).

The catalog will be a kind of Codeforces golden fund in the future.

The catalog is a tree of topics to which posts can be added. We will still work on its functionality, for now there are only basic features. Don't be discouraged if something is not supported, which is very necessary — just let me know!

Any red user can enable directory editing. Remember that it is extremely important to make all changes thoughtfully and carefully. The tree should not become infinite in size. You need to have a sense of proportion when detailing topics. Please add only good, useful articles to the directory. If there is a disagreement on the contents of the catalog, the administration will make the final decision.

Hope this will be helpful. And together we can put together a catalog and keep the catalog up to date.

P.S. Many thanks to KAN who helped a lot with suggestions and catalog initial content.

Hello.

Here's a small improvement for posts and comments. Likes can now be specified in their markup. Maybe this will be useful for organizing some kind of polls or collecting feedback.

Here are some examples:

Yes, I know that this feature can be improved. I would prefer that we try to use it a little and understand what exactly is missing the most. Maybe we need to implement the fully functional polls.

Let's do a small survey using the new feature.

1. What is your age range?

   • under 16:
   • 16-20:
   • 21-25:
   • 26-35:
   • 36+:

2. Tabs or spaces?

   • tabs:
   • spaces:

3. Have you had covid??

   • yes:
   • no:
   • I don't know:

4. Lately, there have been a lot of meaningless blogs on Codeforces. Is it worth strengthening measures to fight against them?

   • yes definitely:
   • rather yes, but not necessarily:
   • rather no, I read some of them:
   • no definitely:

Hello Codeforces!

Oh yes, 2021 ends! I recently realized that 2022 is pronounced like "2020 too". Not that. I want a completely different year!

Anyway, we did a nice job this year. I hope we have pleased you with interesting problems. Thanks to the round coordinators and writers! You make our community richer. Please make us happy in 2022!

I wish you all interesting tasks and brilliant solutions! I wish you error-free code and wish us only rated rounds :-)

Hello, 2022!

And we have traditional gifts!

Change Handle Feature

Hurry! Only until the 10th of January, you can change your handle (but only once)! Note that it will be possible to roll back the changes or change the handle again only after a year. Be careful what you wish for.

You can change your handle to the new one which wasn't used before by anybody or which was used by you before. The links to a profile page with an old handle would automatically redirect to the actual profile.

Again, this year if you took part in at least 10 rounds you can request a handle of an inactive participant. It means that the participant should have a period of activity on Codeforces of at most 180 days, this period should be in 2019 or earlier. The inactive participant can't have posted comments, messages, and so on. It can't take part in more than 2 contests. It will be automatically renamed and informed by email. A user has the opportunity to request back his/her handle: in this case, we will roll back the change and return your previous handle to you. If you can't change your handle to another, it means that some requirements don't meet. Please do not ask me to do something with it. Especially, I do not like requests like "this is my second account, I took an interesting handle myself". I'm not Santa Claus.

Talking about handles I always
reminisce the following story. Once a user wrote me the message: "Please change my handle from I_love_Valya to I_love_Sveta, as I no longer love Valya ..."

New Year's Masquerade of Colors and Ranks

The traditional magical tab has appeared in the profile setting. Happy New Year!

In 2021 (as in 2019 and 2020), with the support of XTX Markets, 6 rounds of the new Codeforces Global Rounds are held: common rounds for both divisions of 7–9 problems each. The duration of the rounds is 2-3 hours, depending on the number and complexity of the problems. All such rounds are rated for all participants. At each such round, 50 brand T-shirts are handed out, and we are happy to give T-shirts to all problem authors.

The prizes for the 6-round series in 2021:

• 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 five rounds he placed the highest.
• The best 20 participants over all series get sweatshirts and place certificates.

Current standings after five rounds (sorted by total points in four best placed rounds):

Hello, Codeforces.

Please, welcome c++20 support on Codeforces. Yes, it is 64-bit. Thanks to Brecht Sanders: I used his distribution GCC-11.2.0-64 from https://winlibs.com/.

If you have installed PBOX, you can add this compiler with the line pbox install gcc11-64-winlibs. Probably, a good idea is to add C:\Programs\gcc11-64-winlibs\bin into the PATH. More about PBOX you can read here.

I use the compilation command line similar to other GCC installations: g++ -Wall -Wextra -Wconversion -static -DONLINE_JUDGE -Wl,--stack=268435456 -O2 -std=c++20 <source>. The only differences are -std=c++20 and -Wall -Wextra -Wconversion (I plan to use somehow such warnings in Polygon to suggest fixes in uploaded files).

Now you can use c++20 in your solutions. I'm not sure there are many features useful in competitive programming. Probably, I'm wrong. For example, now you can write vector v{vector{1, 2}}; instead of vector<vector<int>> v{vector<int>{1, 2}};. What else is useful? Please, if you are good with modern C++ then write.

You might be interested in looking at such a table. Before implementation, I always test every C++ distribution for the efficiency of reading and writing large amounts of data. For example, the latest GCC compiler from MSYS2 is terribly slow in some cases. I don't want to use it here. Also, it happens that some specifiers like lld or Lf work unexpectedly. In the table by reference, the second line is the added compiler. The columns correspond to different tests. The cell contains the time of the test execution. If I have time, I will someday publish scripts for testing c++ compiler installations.

Bye for now,
— Mike

Hey! I'm happy to report that Pypy3 is supported. Please test that it works as expected. Thanks!

P.S. I remember about GCC 11, it is in the progress. See you soon.

Привет!

Наступил октябрь, а значит, пришло время объявить, что Mail.ru Group совместно с МФТИ, МГТУ им. Н.Э.Баумана и CodeForces запускает седьмой по счету «Технокубок» — олимпиаду за звание самого талантливого молодого программиста среди учеников 8-11 классов!

«Технокубок» входит в проект Перечня олимпиад школьников РСОШ, дающих льготы при поступлении в высшие учебные заведения РФ, как олимпиада I уровня — победители и призеры финального этапа олимпиады смогут поступить в вуз без экзаменов или получить 100 баллов за ЕГЭ по информатике. Кроме того, все победители «Технокубка» получат ценные призы, а также привилегии при поступлении на образовательные проекты Mail.ru Group.

Финал олимпиады пройдет в марте 2022 года. Формат его проведения будет известен позднее в связи с эпидемиологической обстановкой.

Hello.

Sorry for it. Actually, right now I don't have any idea why testing is so slow now. Obviously, it doesn't work as expected. It is not because of problems. So please don't blame writers or coordinators. I'm investigating the reason, but don't see it now.

I myself am very upset and I apologize to the authors, coordinator, and participants. I will do my best to find the cause and fix it. Surprisingly, we haven't made any big changes to this part of the system lately. But something went wrong.

Mike.

UPD: https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/95081#comment-841873

Hello Codeforces!

I am in the process of making improvements and updates to the judgment machines. I've read the post https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/94587 and I think, maybe it is a good idea to make such a compilation line -O3 -funroll-loops -march=native -mtune=native? I haven't done any research that it is definitely better than -O2 and it is best in the general case for CP solutions. In a way, this will only strengthen the gap from Python/PyPy/Java, on the other hand: in pragmas and so you can set up everything. What do you think? What are suggestions to the command line?

P.S. You got it right. Yes, gcc11 std=c++20, pypy3 64-bit and more are coming.

Hello, Codeforces.

We want to run a series of load testing in the production environment for running contests. For this reason, Codeforces Round 739 will be temporarily extended (in order to test it at the current round). We will temporarily disable the ability to send solutions to it so that its extended duration will not affect the results. After the completion of the work, the duration of the round will be returned.

Our current plan is to finish today.

Mike

Hey!

As I don't see the post discussing the round, I decided to write this.

I do not participate much in contests now. But I love Code Jam. Thanks to problem writers and organizers!

It seemed to me that this round was no more difficult than the previous one. How do you like it?

I liked the problems:

• A (tags: interactive, constructive): strange problem — the most naive approach fits into the requirements on the total cost of requests;
• B (tags: number theory, dp): I wrote some kind of DP with memorization of $$$(a, s)$$$, where $$$a$$$ is the last element in the sequence we already placed (I build in increasing order) and $$$s$$$ is the total sum for the future elements. I don't have a proof why it works fast, probably because of the number of divisors is small.
• C (tags: combinatorics, recurrence): the last occurrence of 1 is the position of $$$n$$$, so we can divide sequence with this position on two parts and use DP to calculate the answer (don't forget to multiply on binomial coefficient);
• D (tags: graphs, flows, greedy): I used min-cost-flow to match Ms on the first field and the second in optimal way. I tried all possible values of flow to iterate over all possible pairs of Ms I want to match and took best cost among all choices.

Всем привет!

Сегодня мы открываем еще один курс в разделе EDU. Этот курс будет создаваться силами энтузиастов из сообщества. Первое занятие в нём подготовил Егор peltorator Горбачёв, тема — "Префиксные суммы и разностные массивы". Мы уже знакомы с его замечательными учебными видеоматериалами. Спасибо за помощь, Егор!

Типичное занятие раздела EDU содержит серию шагов, состоящих из видеороликов, конспекта и набора учебных задач.

Мы будем рады инициативе со стороны авторитетных членов сообщества по подготовке следующих занятий. Пока мы только начинаем, но надеемся на вашу помощь. Текущее требование к авторам занятий простое — красный цвет аккаунта сейчас или когда-либо в прошлом. По вопросам и предложениям надо писать Павлу pashka Маврину — координатору и завучу курса EDU от сообщества.

Hi Codeforces!

Yes, I know it's already April. Time flies so fast lately! Exactly a year ago we were just learning all the "delights" of lockdown.

So let's remember this 2020! What was it like? I don't know about you, but we had a hell of a lot of work.

I will now show you some graphs and you will be very surprised. Lockdown effect? Of course, but we did our best too.

Many thanks to everyone who did not stand aside! In 2020, we celebrated our 10th anniversary and crowdfunding money helps us grow and move forward. You helped us and each other. Thank you. Thank you for your contribution!

We've been working hard all year to make this community a better place. Did it work out? It's up to you to judge. Many thanks to everyone who invested time and effort:

• geranazavr555, kuviman, cannor147 helped a lot with development and new features;
• Una_Shem provided great organizational assistance;
• our problem coordinators are the greatest: KAN, antontrygubO_o, isaf27, 300iq, significant assistance was provided by BledDest, adedalic and budalnik, vovuh for preparing Div3 rounds;
• stingray advised and helped set up the network;
• our friends from VK for their help in our infrastructure;
• and help of problem writers and testers is immortal!

Time to take stock of 2020.

Partner Events

We are pleased to hold programming competitions with companies or for companies. I'm sure this is a great way to support the community of young programmers and hire talented candidates. Here is a list of our main partners this year:

• Telegram and personally Pavel Durov is supporting Codeforces activities for many years, every regular round is held with their help, thank you!
• ICPC — in 2020 we held several joint events (and we liked it!), I hope there will be more
• Mail.Ru — Technocup and Russian AI Cup
• VK, VK Cup — now a personal multi-track competition for Russian-speaking programmers
• XTX Markets, Codeforces Global Rounds — a series of 6 rounds with a separate scoring and souvenirs for the best participants
• Harbour.Space University — a series of educational rounds, the selection of summer school Tech Scouts
• JetBrains, Kotlin Heroes Rounds — Kotlin programming language contests
• Huawei — research competitions (marathons) with elements of machine learning
• Raiffeisenbank — round for both divisions with cool prizes
• Grakn Labs — round for both divisions with money prizes
• Microsoft, Microsoft Q # Coding Contest — unusual quantum computing competition

Hello, Codeforces!

I understand that 2021 has been going on for a long time, but here I have picked up a subset of some of the improvements that the Codeforces team made in 2020. Soon I will publish numbers (no, charts) with statistics for 2020. In the meantime, I bring to your attention a list of changes and improvements.

By the way, this is a decent list. This is about half to a quarter of all changes. It's just that other changes are more often somewhere in the internals of the system and are not visible to users. Please read this list. Each item is the effort of someone from the team. Thanks to geranazavr555, kuviman and cannor147 for their efforts. You've made our platform better! Well, by the way, I don't quit programming and many improvements were made by me.

The items on the list are written in a concise and informal form, many of the items I just copied from commit messages from git. If you want more details — ask in the comments, we will tell you! Of course, I forgot to include some improvements in the list.

Hello Codeforces!

This unusual and difficult 2020 has come to an end! What will the new year be like? I wish all of us that we have the opportunity to meet in person so that the contests take place not only online. I ask you to think of something important and good. Let this wish come true!

We have had a large number of rounds this year. I hope we have pleased you with interesting problems. Thanks to the round coordinators and writers! You make our community richer. Please make us happy in 2021!

I wish the participants victories over yourself (and over problems!) and development of your skills, interest and curiosity!

Hello, 2021!

And we have traditional gifts!

Change Handle Feature

Hurry! Only until the 10th of January, you can change your handle (but only once)! Note that it will be possible to roll back the changes or change the handle again only after a year. Be careful what you wish for.

You can change your handle to the new one which wasn't used before by anybody or which was used by you before. The links to a profile page with an old handle would automatically redirect to the actual profile.

Again, this year if you took part in at least 10 rounds you can request a handle of an inactive participant. It means that the participant should have a period of activity on Codeforces of at most 180 days, this period should be in 2017 or earlier. The inactive participant can't have posted comments, messages and so on. It can't take part in more than 2 contests. It will be automatically renamed and informed by email. A user has the opportunity to request back his/her handle: in this case, we will roll back the change and return your previous handle to you. If you can't change your handle to another, it means that some requirement doesn't meet. Please do not ask me to do something with it. Especially, I do not like requests like "this is my second account, I took an interesting handle myself". I'm not Santa Claus.

Talking about handles I always
reminisce the following story. Once a user wrote me the message: "Please change my handle from I_love_Valya to I_love_Sveta, as I no longer love Valya ..."

New Year's Masquerade of Colors and Ranks

The traditional magical tab has appeared in the profile setting. Happy New Year!

— MikeMirzayanov

You can view PDF version of the tutorial by the link.

Добрый день!

15-го ноября состоялся Четвертьфинал Южного подрегиона NEERC (Northern Eurasia) чемпионата ICPC. В этом году соревнование проходило онлайн. Соревновались 108 команд, многие из которых получили приглашение по результатам квалификационного этапа.

Совсем скоро в пятницу, 25-го декабря в 14:35 (МСК) состоится онлайн-зеркало 2020-2021 ICPC, NERC, Южный четвертьфинал (онлайн-трансляция, правила ICPC).

Надеюсь, вам понравятся задачи. Председателем жюри этого соревнования являюсь я, а над задачами работал дружный коллектив жюри экс-участников чемпионата из Саратовского ГУ и иногородние члены жюри: adedalic, ashmelev, BledDest, DmitryKlenov, DStepanenko, elena, KAN, kuviman, MikeMirzayanov, pashka, PavelKunyavskiy, Дмитрий Мещеряков, Герман Наркайтис. Спасибо!

Отдельные лучи благодарности тестерам: Merkurev, Um_nik, romanasa, josdas, budalnik, Perforator, Oleg_Smirnov, IlyaLos, Supermagzzz, Stepavly, Igor_Kudryashov, HolkinPV, Edvard, le.mur!

Приглашаю команды ICPC к участию и просто индивидуальных участников соревнований Codeforces принять участие!

Конечно, соревнование будет нерейтинговое. Участников официального соревнования я прошу воздержаться от участия в зеркале и обсуждении задач до его окончания.

Так как в этом году аудитория участников была шире (из-за онлайн-формата), то и задачи мы подобрали чуть доступнее, чем в прошлые годы. Если вы из топ-команды, которая претендует на медаль в Финале ICPC, то, возможно, веселее вам будет решать этот контест лично.

Удачи!

In 2020, with the support of XTX Markets, 6 rounds of the Codeforces Global Rounds were held. Each round was common for both divisions. All such rounds were rated for all participants. At each such round, 50 brand T-shirts were handed out, and we gave T-shirts to all problem writers!

I say a big thank you to XTX Markets (and personally to Yuri Bedny and Alexander Gerko) for supporting Global Rounds. Without your help, we could not host them! I sincerely admire companies like these who come to support and develop the community that some of their employees come from. It will be great if other companies follow the example and also offer their help. We need it!

The prizes for the 6-round series in 2020:

• 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.

Final results (and congratulations!):

Mail.ru Group совместно с МФТИ, МГТУ им. Н. Э. Баумана и Codeforces в шестой раз запускает «Технокубок» — олимпиаду по программированию для школьников. В этом году «Технокубок» вошел в перечень олимпиад первого уровня.

Сразиться за звание самого талантливого молодого программиста приглашаются учащиеся средних образовательных учреждений 8-11 классов.

Победители и призеры олимпиады будут определены по результатам очного этапа, который будет проведен 7 марта 2021 года на базе МФТИ, МГТУ им. Н.Э.Баумана, а также на других региональных площадках, о которых будет сообщено позднее.

Привет, Codeforces!

Есть кое-что новое. Кажется, теперь переиспользовать задачи с раундов в учебных и прочих целях станет проще.

Как вы знаете, в мэшапы можно добавлять задачи с прошедших раундов Codeforces просто по их кодам вида 1234D (айдишник контеста + буква задачи). Я сам регулярно этим пользовался, когда преподавал в Саратовском университете — очень удобно было так делать тренировки: задачи ожидаемой сложности и тематики, есть русское и английское условия, можно посмотреть разбор и множество решений. Почти всюду очень сильные тесты по причине поддержки взломов и довзламывания, задачи хорошо подготовлены. Кроме того, с помощью списков пользователей можно для группы учащихся легко подобрать задачи, которые они не решали.

Но была и проблема: задачи в таких тренировках легко гуглились. И если взрослые участники в большинстве своем могли справится с искушением подсмотреть решение или тесты, то новички иногда поступали нечестно. Я получал несколько просьб придумать что-то с этим недостатком. Одна из последних таких просьб была от Daniel Darooha Sleator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sleator). Спасибо за идею!

Итак, кажется, работа завершена. Встречайте новую возможность на Codeforces: теперь вы можете переписать условия для задач в мэшапах, полностью заменив его на своё собственное. Подробнее о возможностях нового функционала:

• в мэшапах для задач появляется новый ссылка-значок , перейдя по которому будет форма для создания/редактирования нового условия;
• вы можете использовать оригинальный текст условия как шаблон при написании собственного: будьте очень аккуратны — вы должны в точности повторить все детали условия, чтобы задачи формально не различались;
• эта форма сравнивает набор формул в оригинальном тексте и новом условии и если они различаются как множества, то будет соответствующее подробное предупреждение;
• вы можете установить собственные тесты из условия (примеры) — здесь тоже надо быть очень внимательным, чтобы они были формально корректными;
• если вы добавили примеры, то сначала решения будут протестированы на них, а лишь затем на официальных тестах;
• вы можете загрузить собственные файлы с изображениями и использовать их в условиях;
• есть настройка, чтобы временно выключать использование нового условия (например, если оно еще в разработке).

Учитывая, что в архиве сейчас уже более 6500 задач, открывается отличная перспектива для организации тренировок и учебных занятий.

Надеюсь, что нововведение будет полезно. Пишите в комментариях, что можно улучшить и/или исправить.

М.

During the round Grakn Forces 2020 many of you can notice that now we highlight diff in statements if they changed. Do you like this new feature?

Also, I'm thinking on the way to automatically notify participants if statements changed. I still do not fully understand how this should ideally be implemented. Sometimes it is true that just a forgotten comma was added. On the other hand, it is almost always better to notify of changes. What do you think?

In 2020 (as in 2019), with the support of XTX Markets, 6 rounds of the new Codeforces Global Rounds will be held. These will be common rounds for both divisions of 7–9 problems each. The duration of the rounds will be 2-3 hours, depending on the number and complexity of the problems. All such rounds will be rated for all participants. At each such round, 50 brand T-shirts will be handed out, and we will be happy to give T-shirts to all problem authors and problem testers.

The prizes for the 6-round series in 2020:

• 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.

Current standings after four rounds (sorted by total points in four rounds):