Actually time limits r rly tight,otherwise i find it quiet amusing & useful :)

At what point exactly has it been made obligatory to participate in the Codechef Long Contests?

That being said, I'm not much into optimizing constants either, but at least this month I didn't have to do that. You do need to have the right complexity, though ;)

As for me, Long Contests were the most favorite online perfomance before I became a part of CodeChef team. Sometimes you have to learn some difficult algorithm during these ten days or write some crazy heuristic for Challenge problem. I find it really exciting.

You should understand that we are trying to cover all difficulty levels of problems to make contest attractive for both beginners and experienced participants. That is the reason why we increased the number of problems up to 10. There are also brilliant editirials for every problem, it is something we miss after some of CF rounds.

So, don't give up and try to do your best every contest. Yes, difficulty level of some problems is very high, but from the other side you have ten days and you are free to choose suiteble time during this period.

Good Luck! :)

On the other hand, I find it most interesting . - It is unique of its kind

• These long contest almost always make me learn something new that short contests do not because there is always an urge to solve the problem for points more than just solving it for practice(atleast in my case) .Hence they make me learn new algorithms and ds through web.

• The other short contests on different portals , do not allow me to think much and I am always bothered about the time left , time penalties and try to submit quickly and thus solutions are error prone.

• The 10 days long duration gurantees that everyone can participate and that too of their own choice of time

• Challenge problem makes me solve real world problems that are not completely solvable practically in time