Hi everyone!
We wanted to let you know about a new coding competition that’s just kicked off — it's called Wincent DragonByte, and it's the first time it’s happening. It is a joint effort of people at Wincent and experienced competitive coders (mainly) from Slovakia, with misof as the main coordinator, who has 25 years of experience with preparing coding contests. We will do our best to make the problems fun, challenging and well prepared.
This is a pilot run, so the format is simple:
- Registration is open now until June 28.
- There’s a 48-hour qualification round on June 27–28 — get to know the format, solve a few problems to reach a reasonable point threshold, and you’re in.
- The Online Round happens on July 12 (3 hours, classic ICPC/Codeforces-style contest). And then the top 20 go to Bratislava, Slovakia, in September for the finals.
What’s in it for you?
- If you’re in the top 256, you’ll get a special edition DragonByte t-shirt.
- If you get to visit Bratislava, we’ll help you with €400 for travel/accommodation.
- And if you finish in the top 3, you get €10k / €5k / €2.5k.
It’s open to adults based in most of Europe, the US, or Canada — we had to limit scope this time around due to some legal and logistical constraints. They know it’s not ideal and are hoping to expand eligibility in the future. Full eligibility criteria are on the website.
If you’re curious or just want a reason to stretch your algorithmic muscles, check it out: wincentdragonbyte.com
can Russians participate?
If they have residence in one of the eligible countries, than yes. For more details, please see point 4. Eligibility at https://www.wincentdragonbyte.com/terms. It is due to logistical reasons (for example we are not able able to send prizes to Russia), and legal reasons (we cannot create a competition, where only some participants can win a prize).
We hope we can expand to more countries in the future, or create a separate open category for people not eligible to win prizes. This year, we wanted to keep it simple. Thank you for understanding.
idk, your message seem to contradict the very pointer you provide:
Not be a national or resident of a country under sanctions or trade restrictions by the EU, UN, or US.orz! I'm excited to see a Slovak competition, looking forward to participate:)
PS: the website doesn't load for me, anyone else facing the same problem? any idea what could be wrong? (upd: resolved. seems like it's just some rare bug specific to my wifi network.)
<3
The qualification round has already been running for ~12 hours and will continue to run for ~36 more. Registration will remain open until the end of the round.
why isn't it possible to participate in online round as unrated if country is not supported?
Sorry about that :( TL,DR is that we wanted to do that but company lawyers said otherwise, so we couldn't.
We will publish all test data after the round so anyone can solve the tasks for fun and practice.
There are already some plans for the next iteration of the contest and AFAIK people at Wincent have actively been looking into both expanding the set of eligible countries and making unofficial participation possible, but for now giving you the test data and solutions after the round is the best we could do.
Hope the contest will become eligible for many more countries so me and the boys can participate in
Thank you very much for the contest and problems! Here's what I thought about the qualification round problems:
N: Really great problem, the intended solution is very cute. Unfortunately, I instead brute-forced all pairs $$$(x, x + d)$$$ where $$$x$$$ consists only of the digits $$$0$$$ and $$$9$$$ (which is provable, but kind of silly in retrospect lol).
T: I kind of gave up after not being able to prove/construct anything involving a small-ish amount of L-tiles. I see now that "keep attaching Ls to the 7x7 solution" is pretty natural, although I wonder what proportion of people found the invariant which proves this?
R: My sense was that this problem wasn't too difficult, but just involved some rather annoying casework/figuring out some tricks to count things fast enough. I didn't bother implementing anything for this problem (nor T) though since ~500 participants meant that pretty much everyone who tried would qualify. I suspect that the lack of attempts on R is due to people who felt similarly.
B: Solid brute-force problem, feels kind of educational. This was by far the easiest problem for me, since I didn't find the cute construction for N.
A funny way to find the invariant is to find random maximal configurations and calculate some statistics on uncovered cells. For example, if you use an L and another piece in the 3x3 grid, the two uncovered cells are always corners.
According to Wincent Dragonbyte website, the final round is taking place today in Bratislava, Slovakia. I've created a list of participants (short version below, interactive version is available at the Competitive Programming Hall of Fame):