Hello everyone!

Round 2 of All-Russian Programming Championship CROC-2013 will take place today. Round was prepared by sdya, Seyaua, Gerald and traditionally, problem statements were translated to English by Delinur.

Good news for people, who didn't qualify to this round — today everyone can participate out the competition. Additionally, round will be rated for both official participants and out of competition participants.

Remind some facts about the official participants:

• All the participants should be 18+ years old
• The championship finals are going to take place on May, 16-17 in Moscow in the CROC office (50 participants)
• The CROC company pays for the accomodation in Moscow during the finals
• For Russian citizens: the travel expenses around Russia will be covered, the transport expenses outside Russia can be covered possibly partially but you need to contact CROC and clarify it for each particular case
• All finalists should confirm invitation and their participation in finals until May 2

A little bonus: top 200 official Championship contestants will receive t-shirts!

Enjoy problems and good luck!

UPD: Point values for problems will be unusual today. 500-1500-1500-2000-2500 for first division and 500-1000-1500-2500-2500 for second.

UPD2: We are really sorry for technical problems. After some discussion we have decided that this round should be rated. The list of the finalists will be based on today's results.

Hi all!

CodeForces 180 will take place at 19/4 17:30 (CEST). I (SteamTurbine), and Ivan Li (AEtheReal) are the authors of the round.

This time you will need to help some polar bears to solve their problems. You know, life in the arctic is hard, they may face difficulties about catching fish, keeping warm etc.

Thanks Gerald for helping us to prepare the round, MikeMirzayanov for the great platform and Delinur for translation.

We hope that the polar bears are not going to eat you. Good Luck.

UPD: Scoring will be dynamic. Problems are sorted by increasing order of difficulty.

Editorial is here(All except Div 1 E) and here(Div 1 E).

Result (div1):

1. tourist (Solved all!)
2. wjmsbmr
3. tckwok0
4. msg555
5. Erop

Result (div2):

1. Parsa.pordel
2. a88027180
3. Raoul

Some fun facts:

In 297E - Mystic Carvings (written by AEtheReal), the figure in the problem looks like the facial expression "XD" and "囧", which is done intentionally.

Moreover, three lines can intersect in the following 5 ways:

While discussing the problem, we refer those as "川", "囧", "XD", "卄" and "△". Chinese characters are interesting :)

Good day)

Soon is coming Round 1 of the All-Russian Programming Championship CROC-2013. Contestants who gain a score equal to the 400-th place finisher score or greater will advance to the Round 2 (also you need to gain positive score).

Round will be held by usual Codeforces rules (with hacks and decreasing values of the problems). During the round the problems are judged only on pretests and system testing will take place after the end of the contest. The pretests do not cover all possible cases of input data, test your programs carefully.

Before the end of the round it is strictly forbidden to publish the problem statements/solutions/any thoughts and ideas about them elsewhere. It is forbidden to talk about the problems, discuss the statements, solutions and so on.

The problems were prepared by the group of authors: Pavel Kholkin (HolkinPV), Gerald Agapov (Gerald) and Michael Mirzayanov (MikeMirzayanov). I will add that our team have already prepared for you qualification round and answered the questions during the whole competition. Traditionally thanks to Mary Belova (Delinur) for translating the problems.

UPD1: The problems are sorted by increasing of estimated difficulty. The score dustribution is decided to be not standard a little bit : 1000, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500.

UPD2: due to the large number of participants, it is decided that it will not be able to participate out the competition. For official contest participants the round will be rated.

We wish all the participants good luck and successful advance to the next round of competition.

Hi everybody!

Let me remind you that on the 12th of April, at 20:00 the Qualification Round of the All-Russian Programming Championship CROC-2013 will start.

You need to participate in the Qualification Round to make it to Round 1. Contestants who gain a score equal to the 2000-th place finisher score or greater will advance to the Round 1 (also you need to gain positive score).

At the Qualification Round you will find a few problems, roughly ordered by the increasing complexity. During the Qualification Round the problems are judged only on pretests and system testing will take place after the end of the Qualification Round (round continues for 48 hours). The pretests do not cover all possible cases of input data, test your programs carefully! The Qualification Round has no hacks or decreasing values of the problems.

The round will last for 48 hours, but it does not mean that we encourage you to spend all this time solving of problems. We hope that most participants will cope with the problems (or with most problems) in a shorter period of time. This duration of the round is chosen so that each participant could find a convenient time to participate.

Before the end of the round it is strictly forbidden to publish the problem statements/solutions/any thoughts and ideas about them elsewhere. It is forbidden to talk about the problems, discuss the statements and so on. Be honest and let the best men make it into Round 1. When the Qualification Round is over, you can discuss the problems and solutions.

You can register for the round at any time up to its end.

The results of the round will not affect the rating, non-competitive participation in the round is not allowed. However, all tasks will go to the archive after the end of the round.

Best of luck and enjoy solving the problems!

P.S. You can't take part here unofficially. You may register to the Championship here. The working language of the Championship is Russian, but all the problems will be in English too.

Most agile participants have registered before we implemented validation rules around Championship registration. So some registrations will be canceled. Sorry for it — you may register to the Champ and register for round after it.

UPD: Testing is completed. Unofficially qualification cut-off is 950. Participants with at least 950 points advance to Round 1. It can be changed because of cheaters disqualifications.

Hello everyone!

Codeforces Round #179 will take place on Thursday, April 11th at 19:30 MSK. This is my fifth Codeforces round and I hope not the last.

I'd like to thank Gerald for helping me to prepare the round. Special thanks to Delinur for translation of all problem statements into English.

I strongly recommend you to read ALL the problems.

Problems point values for 1 division will be standart. For the 2 division it will be: 500-1500-1500-2000-2500.

Gl & hf ! :)

Contest is over. I hope that problems vere interesting for you.

Division 1 winners:
1). marcina007
2). yeputons
3). gawry
4). KADR
5). enot110

Division 2 winners:
1). goie
2). Koblyk
3). Beriand

Ideas of the solutions are here.

Hi all! :)

I (Untitled) invite you to participate in Codeforces Round #178 (Div. 2) which will be held today. I want to thank Gerald Delinur MikeMirzayanov for their help in preparation of this event. I also want to thank havaliza who tested the round and made the graphics for the problems.

The hero of today's contest is Shaass. Hope you enjoy helping him! :D

Good luck and have fun ;)

UPD. Editorial is partially out and will be completed soon! :{

ABBYY Cup 3.0 is coming! Within the Cup we announce the programming problem contest. Best problems will go to ABBYY Cup 3.0 and best authors will win prizes!

A problem should include:

You can also add a complexity level (easy, medium, hard) and your ideas about modifications. We are interested in "heuristic" problems besides "classic". An example of a heuristic problem from the ABBYY Cup 2.0 is here.

All problems must be new i.e. invented by you. Every contestant can send no more than three problems. If your problem does not go to ABBYY Cup 3.0, we promise to keep it in secret. Jury members are no longer participants of programming contests and they are not interested in using your problems apart from ABBYY Cup.

Please send your problems in .pdf, .doc, .docx, or .txt format to abbyycup@abbyy.com with subject "ABBYY problem contest". Problems are accepted from 8 to 21 April. Write your name, surname, school and graduation year. It is desirable to write your Codeforces handle. Be sure that you receive the answer which confirms receiving your email!

We hope that our problem contest will be held every year and will help to find new talants and make ABBYY Cup more interesring for contestants!

Greetings!

Codeforces Round #177 takes place tomorrow at 19:30 by Moscow. I hope you all will take part and enjoy the problems.

Gerald, as usually, helps in preparings, Delinur translates all the problems for you. Thanks to them.

Good Luck!

Points distribution is standard:

Div1: 500 1000 1500 2000 2500

Div2: 500 1000 1500 2000 2500

Here are today's winners:

Div1:

1. wjmsbmr

2. peter50216

3. rng_58

4. XilinX

5. RAD

6. RomaWhite

7. eduardische

Div2:

1. alimiaomiao

2. yutaka1999

3. Alex.lap

4. zlqiszlq

The contest is over; I hope you've enjoyed it. 1465 participants submitted at least one problem correctly. Unfortunately, nobody managed to solve all 6 problems; congratulations to ShadowSong who won the contest by solving 5 first problems with the lowest penalty time!

290A - Mysterious strings

Last year we've verified that a lack of problem statement doesn't prevent participants from solving and submitting the problem successfully and at the same time saves the problem setter some writing effort. This year we've ascertained this again. Well, I could've invented a long and knotty legend about you, a young but very promising software developer, were summoned to White House and given a task of utmost importance: to deliver an interactive list of USA presidents from founding fathers to our days. It could have featured a dramatic time-consuming search for necessary info, pursuits, firefights, a wounded teammate whose dying words were "Eight is Van Buren, don't forget... print Van, just Buren... doesn't pass". But what for?

The contest editorial is available here.

Some jokes are fun only for the first time, repeating them makes them lose their charm. I certainly hope that April Fools Day Contest is not the case, but there's only one way to verify this :-) I'm happy to invite you to take part in the verification process which will take place on Monday April 1st. Let me disprove the suspicions some people have: the joke is the contest contents, not the fact of its existence or the lack of it — that would have been too simple :-)

In this round you'll face several weird problems and 2 hours to solve them. The contest will be unrated (you bet!), and it will follow ACM ICPC rules (no hacks, the standings are decided by the number of solved problems and penalty time earned on them). You can submit solutions in any language allowed by Codeforces. To get an idea of what awaits you, you can have a look at the last year's contest.

Be warned, to enjoy participation in this round you'll need a sense of humor compatible with mine! It's April Fools Day, after all. Good luck!

Upd. Registration is open till the end of the contest.