Hi everybody.

The VK Cup Round 3 is coming (exact time).

The duration will be longer than usual, likely 3 hours.

As usually in VK Cup, there will be three contests — div1, div2, official one. All of them are rated. Div1 and div2 versions are for individual participants, not for teams.

Setters are Radewoosh, Errichto and qwerty787788. I think that (some) problems are extremely interesting and I really wish I could participate. Thanks to GlebsHP and MikeMirzayanov, we wouldn't have a round without them. Also, thanks to AlexFetisov and winger for testing.

We will later inform about the final duration. Maybe we will inform about the number of problems and scoring.

I wish you great fun and no frustrating bugs. And Limak wishes you good luck!

UPD

• The contest will last 3 hours.
• ADJUSTED POINTS DROP — Points will decrease with such a speed that submitting a problem at the end would give you the same number of points as in standard 2-hour rounds.
• I updated testers above.
• Top50 in the "Div1 Edition" contest will get t-shirts. Have I already said "I wish I could participate"?

UPD 2

There are 9 problems. Div2 gets problems 1 - 6, and Div1+R3 gets 3 - 9. It means that there are 4 shared problems.
Division 2: 500 750 1000 1500 2250 3000
R3 & Div1: 500 1000 1750 2250 2250 3000 3000

UPD 3

Enjoy the editorial

UPD 4

The system testing is over. Congratulations to winners. Later I will try to put winners here in some nice format.

On May, 5, 16:05 (UTC) Codeforces Round 350 is going to start! Yes, pay attention to the non-standard start time.

I took advantage of my official position and the round is expected to be a bit experimental with an expanded set of problems. Perhaps for experienced participants (sorry, Div 1) it could seem easy. This time, emphasis was placed on the main target audience of the round: so in the round will be a lot of very simple problems, but even the top of the second division will find something interesting. In addition, one of the problems will be offered in two versions — in a simplified version with small constraints and in a harder version with greater constraints. Thus, if you immediately realize solution for large constraints, you can write and submit the same code on the both version.

The problem writers are me and fcspartakm. We hope that you will enjoy the problems and the round will be fun and useful!

The expected scoring is:

• A: 500
• B: 750
• C: 1000
• D1: 1000
• D2: 500 (i.e. the complete solution of D is 1500 points)
• E: 2000
• F: 2500

Good luck!

UPD: As it was pointed in the comments we have a tricky point about hacks with problems D1/D2.

1. To avoid the situation when participant locks the problem D1 and looks the solution of the problem D2 in his room, you are allowed to lock the problems D1/D2 only together in the same time and only if both of your solutions for this problems passed the pretests. In the other words, the possibility to lock D1/D2 will appears only after you solved both problems. The problems D1/D2 will be locked together in the same moment.

2. To avoid the situation of double reward for hack of D1 and D2 of the same participant, the participant A after successful hack of the participant B on the problem D1 loses the possibility of the hack B on the problem D2. Similarly if the participant A successfully hacks the participant B on the problem D2, then A loses the possibility of the hack B on D1.

UPD 2: The round is over. My congratulations to the winners! Here are the heroes of the round.

The Top-5 among the official participants:

1. xlk200
2. TableEnterer_Lin
3. cykhhq595
4. xxxholic
5. A_Navie_Moer

The Top-5 among the unofficial participants:

1. anta
2. -XraY-
3. Um_nik
4. halyavin
5. Enchom

UPD 3: Problem analysis is now available.

Hi everyone!

May 2, 11:00 (MSK) the mirror of XX Ural Championship will take place for Open Cup participants on Yandex.Contest system.

Contest is not stage of Open Cup, but it's winner will be awarded Internet-Ural Champion's Cup. Authors are — winger, Kurpilyansky, Stigius, Erop, AlexFetisov and other Ural (and not only) veterans. Thanks to GlebsHP, TeaPot and SirShokoladina for testing and useful advices, and thanks to MikeMirzayanov for Polygon.

UPD

Contest link: https://official.contest.yandex.ru/contest/2486/enter/

UPD2

BREAKING NEWS: If you don't have login for Open Cup, you can register here: https://contest.yandex.ru/contest/2486/enter/?lang=en

UPD3

Teams without login for Open Cup should enter the contest via link above, teams with login for Open Cup — via https://official.contest.yandex.ru/contest/2486/enter/

Statements: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nrdu4jaqamqnjdp/chu-statements-en.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xg18wiej9xm8yqw/chu-statements-ru.pdf?dl=0

Hello, all!

We are glad to announce the final version of Russian Code Cup 2016 rules! The most important news of this year is that Russian Code Cup goes international, now the problems are available in both Russian and English. Anybody can participate, to enter the competition, please register at http://russiancodecup.ru, participants of previous championships need to confirm their participation in their profile.

This year the prize pool is again 750 000 rub. We have changed the structure of the prizes to give more money prizes away, so top 25 now get cash. The winner gets 150 000 rub, the second place gets 100 000 rub, the third place gets 65 000 rub. Those who take places from 4 to 10 get 30 000 rub, and places from 11 to 25 can account for 15 000 rub. Top 200 in elimination round get branded Russian Code Cup t-shirts.

There are three levels of the championship. First you must qualify in one of the three Qualification Rounds (May 8, May 29 and June 5). Top 200 from each round proceed to Elimination Round (June 19), top 50 from it proceed to Final Round (September 18). If you fail to qualify in a Qualification Round you can still try in the following Qualification Rounds.

We invite you to the Qualification Round 1 on Sunday, May 8, 19-00 Moscow Time, and wish everyone good luck!

Hi everyone!

Yeah, you guessed it right, after a long four month break after the latest div. 1 round which was not dedicated to any official competition, you will once again have the unique opportunity to participate in usual codeforces round. No t-shirts for top-x competitors! No multi-level selection system for the opportunity to compete in final! No esoteric languages or marathon-like problems! We even will not tell you the scoring untill the very end of the round! That's it, like the good old days.

So this round was prepared for you by Ivan Smirnov (ifsmirnov) and me (adamant). We want to thank Max Akhmedov (Zlobober), Alex Frolov (fcspartakm), Edvard Davtyan (Edvard) and Mike Mirzayanov (MikeMirzayanov) for the help in round preparing, and useful advice. Special thank to Edvard for taking the role of coordinator this time and traditionally MikeMirzayanov for polygon and codeforces systems.

Good luck to everyone! We really hope that you will have a lot of fun participating in this round :)

UPD. Score distribution:

Div. 2: 500-1000-1500-2000-3000

Div. 1: 500-1000-2000-2000-3000

UPD. 2. Also thanks a lot to Alex Fetisov (AlexFetisov). Forgive me, please, I have totally forgotten about you :)

UPD. 3. If you missed the editorial, you can find it here.

April 25, 18:00 (UTC) the second Wild-card round of VK Cup 2016 will take place.

Participants are invited to achieve progress in solving an unusual problem. VK Cup teams which were advanced to the Round 2 (and didn't advance to the Round 3) will take part in VK Cup 2016 - Wild Card Round 2 officially. In addition, this round will be open to the public for unofficial participation for everybody. Registration will be open for the whole round duration.

The round will be one week long. After the end latest submission (with positive score) of each participant will be judged on system tests.

Good luck!

UPD 1: Unfortunately, it turned out that most of current tests were not various enough and did not cover different scenarios of the testing system. Tests in the system have been updated, all submissions will be rejudged. Perhaps the rejudging process will take some time. In addition, the scoring function has been updated (its monotony maintained). Because of this, points for your submissions changed a bit. The restriction on the number of submissions has been added (up to 20000). Check out the updated statement for details.

In 6 hours 2nd Round of the VK Cup 2016 programming competition is going to happen! If you haven't registered for the round — don't worry! There is an extra registration!

The teams who has advanced from VK Cup 2016 Round 1 and VK Cup 2016 Wildcard Round 1 can participate in this round. The competition has regular Codeforces rules. Also in the same time with official round there is a regular rated Codeforces round played on the same problem set for participants from both div1/div2 divisions.

This round was prepared by AlexFetisov and winger. That is the first round which we have prepared as authors. We want to thank Gleb Evstropov (GlebsHP) for his help. Gleb is doing great job as Codeforces coordinator and I wanted to tell that one more time! Also we want to thank Kamil Debowski (Errichto), Mateusz Radecki (Radewoosh), Boris Minaev (qwerty787788), Pavel Kunyavskiy (PavelKunyavskiy) for their help in testing the problems and for great suggestions. Huge shout out for Mike Mirzayanov (MikeMirzayanov) for everything he has done for all of us!

To advance to Round 3 team should have a positive score and has score not less than the score of the 100th team in the final scoreboard. Also note that all teams advanced to Round 3 will get a special edition t-shirt of the competition. Also top-50 participants of the round 3 will get this t-shirt as well.

Good luck and have fun!

Update

Round has been finished. There were some problems during round but we hope that you enjoyed problems. Congratulations to the winners!

Official VK Round 2:

1. Who`s On First Base!: -XraY-, ershov.stanislav
2. Beer and lemon tea: sankear, Zlobober
3. MYCOPOBO3: V--o_o--V, LHiC
4. Never Lucky: subscriber, tourist
5. 33% less bad jokes: ifsmirnov, Arterm

Div1 results: Congratulations to anta who is the winner of this round div1 solving the hardest problem of the contest.

1. anta
2. jqdai0815
3. Petr
4. dotorya
5. ikatanic

Div2 results:

Congratulations to alexrcoleman who is the winner of this round div2 solving all problems less than in an hour!

1. alexrcoleman
2. nherceg
3. santjuan
4. mkisic
5. unused

Editorial http://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/44538

Hello, Codeforces!

Note! The day of the contest here was wrong. Now it's fixed.

Educational Codeforces Round 12 will take place on 20 april 2016 at 18:00 MSK for the first and the second divisions.

The round will be unrated for all users and it will be held with extented ACM ICPC rules. You will have two hours to solve six problems. After that you will have one day to hack any solution you want. You will have access to copy any solution and test it locally.

If you have ideas for some problems or maybe already prepared problems that you can't use in rounds or official competitions, you can write to me.

It seems that it is harder to invent interesting simple problems (like A and B) than difficult ones. So don't be afraid to suggest interesting simple or very simple tasks (of course the difficult tasks are also needed). Please send only the problems for which you know the solution with clear statement (the story is not required). And also please add one or two samples to make the problem statement more clear.

The problemset was suggested by Codeforces users (it's time to lift this sentence inside the tegs). The problem А was suggested by user unprost. The problem B was suggested by Ayush Anand JeanValjean01. The problems C, D and E was suggested by Zi Song Yeoh zscoder. Sheikh Monir skmonir a long ago sent me a problem with difficulty C or D. I improved it by significant increase of the constraints (thanks to Mikhail Tikhomirov Endagorion who told how to solve such things). So the problem F was born.

Thanks a lot to them and all others who are sending the problems! The number of unused problems are increasing. If I didn't miss anything I already replied to all who sent me the problems at least 5-6 days ago. Please be patient if your problem was not used a long while.

The problems was prepared by me (Edvard Davtyan). Thanks to Maria Belova Delinur for checking the English statements. The problems was tested by users suggested them, respectively: unprost, Ayush Anand JeanValjean01, Zi Song Yeoh zscoder and Sheikh Monir skmonir. Thanks a lot to all of them!

I hope you will enjoy the problems! On my mind all the problems except of F is easier than usual, but F is harder.

Good luck and have fun!

Only 30 days left to the ACM ICPC World Finals!

It will be difficult to focus on the problems in such a beautiful place :-)

UPD1: The first part of the contest is finished. The open hacks will be opened in a few minutes.

UPD2: The editorial is ready for the problem F.

UPD3: The editorial is ready.