Hi all!
VeeRoute Marathon starts today: it is a programming competition that is organized by VeeRoute and lasts from February 29 to March 14. We have already posted information about the Marathon here on Codeforces, and now we would like to tell more about its organizer.
VeeRoute is a Russian IT-company that develops solutions for logistics optimization. Even though VeeRoute is a young company, its growth has been very rapid: the staff has doubled in the last few months, and the company is preparing to enter the international markets. There are two offices: in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. VeeRoute is a very attractive workplace for talented and ambitious programmers, because everyday tasks there are challenging and interesting, and the development department is headed by Andrey Lopatin, a two-time world champion in programming.
VeeRoute’s ambition is to become a world leader in the field of IT solutions for logistics optimization. Every day logistics becomes more and more complex, and the key to new challenges is automatization of logistics processes and its management in real time. VeeRoute follows these trends by creating its own Scheduling & Dispatching platform.
If you get excited about challenging and interesting programming problems, if you are good with algorithms and data structures, then VeeRoute Marathon is for you! Register here: http://mirror.codeforces.com/contests/636.
Participants will have to solve a certain optimization problem, similar to those solved by VeeRoute team daily. Do your best and draw VeeRoute’s attention to your talent! VeeRoute is trying to make the world a better place, and looking for individuals who share the same goals and vision.
Good luck and have a nice contest!
Only 1 problem?
a hug step between 2st and 1st prize. O_o
Nobody remember the man who comes second :D Only first is real ;)
One question, Is the time of submitting important in this contest?
A wonderful problem for real masters,but it seems too difficult for me to solve,just watching is enough :D
What happens when I get TLE?
You get zero score for a test.
Looks like an interesting problem. But to be honest, the prizes are almost nothing comparing to that hard problem, writing a program that just generates a valid random solution isn't easy.
I remember in TopCoder marathon matches similar problems, the 1st place gets something like $15,000.
To get prizes you don't have to be better than a problem. You have to be better than other participants. Besides, what is the "difficulty" in approximation/optimization problems?
I saw some marathon TC contests and usually prizes are lower. Right now there are two contests going on and for the first place one can get $5,000 and $10,000. And it's very hard to win there, against a couple of so experienced contestants.
Maybe worse prizes mean an easier contest? Because fewer people participate and they spend less time.
Can I try to solve the problem after the contest is ending?
Not difficult actually(cannot even define for the difficulty), and it's a fun problem! Just like the real life one and have no absolute 'correct' solution! What you need to do is think think think and try try try, I love this.