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Invitation to the March 2014 Long Challenge on CodeChef
By anup.kalbalia, 11 years ago, In English

We hope you participated and enjoyed the changes made to monthly Long Contests.

From now on, we will be having the problem statements available in Mandarin Chinese and Russian as well

As always, the long contests will start on first Friday of every month and last for 10 days. This ensures that two weekends are covered.

Continuing from there, we bring you the CodeChef March 2014 Long Challenge. The March 2014 Algorithm Challenge is taking place on http://www.codechef.com/MARCH14.

Here are the details:
Date: 7th March 2014 to 17th March 2014
Duration: 10 days
Problems: 9 binary problems of varying difficulty levels + 1 challenge problem.

Problem Setters:

Problem Tester:

Editorialist:

Mandarin Translator:

Russian Translator:

It promises to deliver on an interesting set of algorithmic problems with prizes up for grabs.

The contest is open for all and those, who are interested, are requested to register in order to participate.

Check out the local time in your City/Time Zone here. Do share your feedback on what you feel about the new long contest format at feedback@codechef.com

Good Luck! Hope to see you participating.

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Comments Comments (6)
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11 years ago, # |
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I have seen this in the rules:

The score that you will see during the contest will only be partial (obtained on 20% of the test data).

So, does it mean that if I get an AC on the binary problem (i.e. any problem that is not a challenge one), the exact verdict will remain unknown for me till the end of the competition?

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    11 years ago, # ^ |
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    I guess, this question has been already discussed.

    The test data for binary problems is always full. Unless a setter thinks, that his tests are weak and improves them.

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    11 years ago, # ^ |
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    No. For all problems(including the challenge one) the verdict shown will be final. AC on the challenge indicates that the submission runs successfully for all the test data,but the score shown is only for 20% of it.

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11 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

I have participated in this contest after a long break. I have to say that compared to previous contests I had competed in, the quality of this one seemed lower. Let me share my feedback.

First of all, the difficulty of the problems used to be higher before. There were usually at least 2 problems harder than the hardest problem in this contest. Also, the key idea in 3 hardest problems was data structures and even though each of them separately is a nice problem, I didn't feel like the three of them worked in the same contest. The previous contests used to be more balanced.

I'm also very surprised how a task like SSTORY made it into the problemset at all. I can read in the editorial that the author was "inspired" by a spoj problem and its purpose was to introduce new data structures to people. What I actually see is that the task is an almost exact copy of the spoj problem -- it has the same limits and the goal has a minor addition. There used to be somewhat standard problems on Codechef before, but the standard algorithm was usually at least wrapped in something new, not just presented on a very standard application. Also, I don't know how well the final test data cuts off completely incorrect solutions, but at least it fails to cut off my hashing approach with no explicit modulo which is commonly known to be breakable. I believe that if such a problem is used on a long contest, it should have the test data able to break at least the commonly known incorrect solutions.

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    11 years ago, # ^ |
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    @gojira: Thanks a lot for your candid feedback. We will take this feedback very seriously and try and improve on this. We have already shared this with the problem setting panel. Coming up with the right difficulty level is not a very easy thing to do, though we will try and be better at it.

    Regarding SSTORY, yes it has been an unfortunate event, because of which we also had to extend the contest. We deeply regret the issues.

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11 years ago, # |
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The editorials have been published here: http://discuss.codechef.com/tags/march14/

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