Hi,

I am happy to announce that Lyft Level 5 Challenge 2018 — Final Round will be held in Palo Alto on Nov/04/2018 21:10 (Moscow time). The official round contains six problems and will last for two hours.

Winners will receive:

• First place: $2000
• Second place: $1000
• Third place: $500

Here is the list of onsite finalists:

If you are interested in an internship or a job at Lyft, follow the link below.

If you are not participating in the Final Round, you will be able to take part in rated open divisions. Each of them contains six problems and will last for two and a half hours.

This round was prepared by _h_, Lewin, majk, Noam527, stanislav.bezkorovainyi, and me.

Thank you to 300iq, cdkrot, BigBag, danya.smelskiy, Fekete, MrDindows, Nazikk, Sonechko, winger, MaxZubec for help with testing.

Special thanks to KAN for helping me with coordinating, MikeMirzayanov for Polygon and Codeforces, and Lyft for organizing this competition.

If you have never solved interactive problems before, please read this.

Scoring distribution:

Div1 and onsite:

750-1250-1500-2000-2750-3000

Div2:

500-1000-1750-2250-2500-3000

We have onsite issues, the contest was postponed by at least 5 minutes.

Because of the onsite round, the system testing will be in an hour after the round.

Contest is over!

Congratulations to the winners!

Onsite competition:

Div 1:

Div 2:

Editorial is available here.

Are you looking for photos from the onsite round? It is here.

Hungry for yet another contest? On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 17:05 UTC the Lyft Level 5 Challenge will start with the Round 1! This is a combined round having 7 problems and lasting 2 hours, and it will be rated.

The top 100 participants of this round will win a Lyft Level 5 Challenge t-shirt. The top 30 contestants located in the San Francisco Bay area will be invited to the Final Round.

In the Final Round the top three onsite contestants will fight for the cash prizes:

• First place: $2000
• Second place: $1000
• Third place: $500

Many thanks to:

• arsijo for the round coordination,
• fhlasek, KAN, Nazikk, Sonechko, stanislav.bezkorovainyi, MaxZubec for testing the round
• MikeMirzayanov for Codeforces and Polygon platforms
• Lyft for sponsoring the round
• Alice and Bob for playing a crucial role in some of the statements

I'll be on the community Discord server shortly after the contest to discuss the problems.

UPDATE 1: The scoring distribution will be 500-1000-1500-2250-2750-3250-4000.

UPDATE 2: The contest is over and there is an editorial.

UPDATE 3: Congratulations to the winners:

1. tourist
2. V--o_o--V
3. DearMargaret
4. Errichto
5. 300iq

I'm Viktor Barinov (vsb), and I'd like to share a little about my experience with coding competitions and working at Level 5, Lyft's self-driving division. I graduated from Taurida National University, and have been an avid competitor in programming contests since high school.

My first introduction to ACM ICPC problems was at Timus in 2003. I was intrigued by math and algorithmic problems with tricky edge cases. Then I became hooked, solving a few problems from the archive daily. I later discovered UVA Online and started participating in local Ukrainian competitions, trying to advance to all-Ukrainian Finals and ACM ICPC SEERC. I then started competing at TopCoder and Codeforces. After a long path of learning, coding, and debugging, I became red on TopCoder, advanced to onsites with Google Code Jam, Mail.ru Cup, Petrozavodsk training camp, and finally got into ACM ICPC World Finals in 2009 and 2011.

I could spend whole days on problems while at my university and dreamed of turning my hobby into a career. I worked for a few companies before Lyft with more or less computer science challenges, but nothing as exciting as Lyft Level 5. Working on robotics and AI is extremely interesting and a great opportunity. Our division is a year old and operates like a startup — we have lots of high impact projects and a short feedback loop.

I'm grateful to be working on developing this important technology of the future. Having a background in Applied Math and Competitive Programming has set me up for success in my role and enabled me to learn new things for each project. Here are a few examples of projects and problems we're tackling at Level 5:

Big Data

Cars collect a lot of data from sensors and services. One car can generate a few hundred megabytes per second, and a small fleet can generate terabytes of data daily that have to be persisted and indexed in the Cloud for future analysis.

Machine Learning

Perception is a major piece of the self-driving puzzle and requires building high precision and low latency algorithms to detect cars, pedestrians, traffic signs, and more.

Motion planning

These are algorithms that generate car trajectory based on many constraints. Motiong Planning includes computational geometry, optimization methods, numerical methods, and more.

Localization and Mapping

We build 2D and 3D maps from camera and LIDAR data that is used in realtime to improve precision of localization. These problems include computational geometry, data structures and many other Computer Science areas.

Reliable and high performance software

This is a combination of competitive programming and building distributed systems. There are tons of subproblems that need to be solved, function correctly, and fit into some time limits. This needs to be an extremely reliable system — lives depend on it.

And these are just a few parts to developing a self-driving system. It requires a lot of infrastructure work, data platforms and pipelines, and more due to Big Data and High Load.

I am currently focused on building a Data Platform that allows all other projects to run data processing at a petabyte scale, and learning exciting details of all domains in the meantime. As someone with an Applied Math degree and Competitive Programming background, I see a lot of exciting projects with other teams for me to work on for years to come.

Feel free to send me personal message or comment to this post with any questions about Lyft and our Level 5 group.

We are thrilled to announce the Lyft Level 5 Challenge hosted by Codeforces and sponsored by Lyft. This international competition consists of two, timed rounds, where competitors will solve multiple algorithmic puzzles much like the ones we’re solving at Level 5, Lyft’s self-driving division.

Round 1: Elimination

On Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 10:00 PDT, the competition kicks off with a standard two-hour round of seven problems. The top 100 participants will win a Lyft Level 5 Challenge t-shirt. The top 30 contestants located in the San Francisco Bay area will be invited to Round 2.

Round 2: Final at Level 5

On Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 10:00 PST, round 2 kicks off with a standard two-hour round of five problems. Up to 30 contestants will compete for prizes at the Level 5 Engineering Center in Palo Alto, California, and Codeforces will host a parallel round for offsite participants. After the challenge, stick around for a Level 5 team social.

Round 2 Prizes

• First place: $2000
• Second place: $1000
• Third place: $500

Terms and conditions apply.

About Level 5

Level 5 is Lyft’s self-driving division based in Palo Alto, California, and Munich, Germany, where we’re building a full self-driving system. Engineers at Level 5 are equipping vehicles with the latest advancements in sensors and applying deep learning to predict and perceive the world around us. We’re leveraging route by route data from the 10 million Lyft rides completed weekly to both rapidly advance our technology and train our vehicles.

Every member of our fast-moving, collaborative team has the opportunity to have an outsized influence on our self-driving development. And we’re passionate problem solvers, too. Meet Vladimir Iglovikov [kaggle], Viktor Barinov [cf, tc], and Alex Lapin [kaggle, cf, tc].

Help define the future of self-driving technology with us at Level 5. See our open roles at lyft.com/level5, and follow us on Twitter @LyftLevel5.

What is Lyft?

Lyft is the fastest growing ridesharing company in the United States with coverage for over 95% of Americans in all 50 states. We’re working toward our mission of improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.