It has been one year since we hosted our first LunchTime contest. Being the youngest contest among the three that we host, LunchTime certainly has a special place in all our hearts. In fact, the wonderful fragrance of talents we witnessed on that day has spread to new avenues now. New names have come up, school kids have moved to colleges, and some new wizards have turned themselves in, but the competency still is as ferocious and fiery as it was at the start. The numbers surely will have a tale of their own to tell, but what we all have experienced in this past one year of our LunchTime contest is beyond the reach of numbers & words. In anticipation of many more such wonderful years to come, let us step together into a new year of playing together & learning together.
The menu for the anniversary June LunchTime 2014 came from our young buffs in Sergey Kulik, who was juggling the roles of problem setter, editorialist, & Russian translator and we must say he did an immaculate job at it. The problems were tested briskly to ensure that they are party-ready by Roman Furko, while the extra spice of Mandarin translation came from Minako Kojima & Gedi Zheng. We might have been the host of the party, but it was the jovial efforts of our problem-setting panel, which made it so much fun. So, let us give it up for them. With that, we were all ready to get the ball rolling for our anniversary LunchTime & velvet rope was lifted on the fine Sunday morning.
The contest opened to a warm reception with flurry of accepted submissions in the opening minutes of the contest on SMPAIR. And the most amazing sight was to see our young champs making their mark on the contest right from the beginning. fleimgruber was the first among the young geniuses to get his hand dirty on SMPAIR, but he was soon followed by lsmll, liuminghua, & mayukuner. In the first five minutes of the contest, we had all our top three on the rank tables. However, the ultimate victor of the contest was yet to be decided.
As the contest progressed, the battle for glory kept on growing intense. xuxianyou of Hangzhou Xuejun High School Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China was leading the rank tables in the final hour of the contest and it seemed as if he will go all the way with the contest. However, his schoolmate lsmll had other plans and in an interesting turn of events, he took over xuxianyou and finally emerged as the winner of the June LunchTime 2015. But they were not the only ones from China on the rank table, they were well accompanied by seven other of their countrymen. So, let’s meet our winners and find out who all stood were they.
Like always, let’s meet the non-Indians first:
Now our Indian top 10:
A big round of applause for all our winners of the June LunchTime 2014.
Now, let us give you the final figures for the contest:
While the young geniuses from China dominated the international rank table, the Delhites took over the Indian table. But ultimately the delicious competition between the young CodeCheffers from all different schools around the globe made it an utterly delicious entertaining anniversary lunch, and we thank all of you for it.
For deserts, we have the editorials for the problems ready soon after the contest, and if you haven’t tasted them yet, we suggest you do that now.
Editorials – June LunchTime 2014
Now, after the first anniversary LunchTime, it is time to start working towards the contests to come and hope for many such wonderful years to come. So, that will be all from us for now, if you have any queries, or quarrels, feel free to write to us at feedback@codechef.com
We will be back soon with the stories from the contests from July.
Till then, Zài jiàn.
Regards,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef
CodeChef through its inspiring initiatives has always been encouraging programmers across the country. NITK Surathkal has had some really good coders but the “coding culture” as they say, has never been so prominent. When some of us met Anup Kalbalia and members of Team CodeChef at ACM-ICPC Kharagpur and Amritapuri, we realised that the key to the success of a college lies on how it prepares and how motivated members of the teams are. Another striking observation was that the first and second years of college, especially the summer holidays are the best times to hone our coding skills and get really good at competitive programming.
With this insight, NITK CodeChef Campus Chapter started laying more emphasis on spreading awareness on CodeChef and Competitive Programming among the first and second years. During the course of this academic year, we had talks which aimed at introducing students in college to competitive programming. We had a talk on the importance of competitive programming and an introduction to CodeChef and other online judges. Those who attended the talk were amazed by the joy that one gets upon solving problems and seeing your solution getting the green tick. A hands-on session was conducted to help beginners understand the way an online judge works, input-output formats and other subtle details that one needs to know to get started on online judges. Experienced coders shared their experience about how they got inspired to code and how it helped them gain familiarity with commonly used algorithms. Training methods and perseverance were found to be the key to success. The sessions aimed at motivating juniors in college to start competitive programming and prepare for ACM-ICPC in advance.
As we come to the end of the academic year, we feel it has been very promising in terms of participation and enthusiasm among members of NITK-CCCC to learn. We came up with an innovative idea of running a live blog to post tutorials and learning resources. http://nitkcccc.wordpress.com/ is our website and we have been receiving tutorial entries to be published on the blog. We feel that sharing one’s learning experience on a particular topic helps others understand in a better way and creates a healthy learning environment. We presently have tutorials on String Theory, Matrix Multiplication, Dynamic Programming, Graph Theory, STL to name a few. We believe that these tutorials have given a great perspective into different ideas and approaches that different people have to grasp a concept.
We had a series of talks on competitive programming with hands-on problem solving sessions. Ideas and hints to solve related problems to solve the problems on CodeChef were provided. Mentorship to students from the first and second years was something we were able to achieve with fair success. The Facebook group was utilised to spread awareness about talks, contests on CodeChef and other informative articles that would be highly beneficial in the long run. The talks are being conducted by those who were a part of the ACM-ICPC teams this year. We feel that such sessions will help all members to learn most data-structures and algorithms required for competitive programming in a better way.
Conducting local contests on CodeChef has been a regular feature on our agenda. We had an exclusive contest “So You Think You Can Code ?” for the first year students apart from other local contests. This was aimed at getting the first years introduced to competitive programming. We held two international events on CodeChef. INSCRIPTION 2013 is a premier event of NITK’s annual technical fest ENGINEER, during the month of October. TUXCODER was held in April 2014 as a part of the coding week – Tuxride and received an overwhelming response with enthusiastic participation across the globe.
The year 2013-2014 has been a great one for NITK CodeChef Campus Chapter – lot’s of enthusiasm and participation, highest number of teams representing NITK at ACM-ICPC till date, highest rank of an NITK team at ACM-ICPC , members of the chapter securing a top 20 finish in CodeChef Long Challenges, plenty of informative sessions and a website to learn from each other . The coding culture in NITK has never been so prominent and we wish to thank CodeChef for its support and initiatives.
Some promising words from our budding first years:
Chinmay Deshpande, 1st year IT – “I was interested in coding but competitive programming was completely new. I made many errors while submitting my first program on CodeChef, but attending the sessions conducted by the NITKCCCC really helped me submit more efficient solutions. Great job from the seniors. Hope I can contribute the same during my next year as a sophomore ”
Abraham Gerard Sebastian, 1st year CS – “My interest in competitive programming started when I first participated in the INOI in my 11th but this still wasn’t helpful enough to do satisfactorily. But, the regular sessions have not only improved my performance in the contests held on CodeChef but also increased my interest.”
Siddharth Dhananjay, 1st year Metallurgy – “I was interested in coding and computer science in general right from 10th/12th. However, after joining NITK did I hear about CodeChef and competitive programming in general. These sessions taught me a lot of new and useful concepts that are really helpful while solving problems on CodeChef. ”
Looking forward for a bigger year ahead !
Anirudh,
(on behalf of NITK CodeChef Campus Chapter Team)
The start of June Cook-Off 2014 was clean and beautifully lit by the shine of few brilliant Cook-Offs we had hosted. We loved it. And would have been happier had it stayed that way. However, all those shiny moments turned into the ordeals during the course of the contest. What was the cause, you ask? We will let you know latter in the blog post, let us start with the good things first.
Before we move into the blog post, let us thank the ardent problem setting panel without whom, none of this would have been possible. Not the crash, the amazing June Cook-off that you enjoyed. 
The problem setter Constantine Sokol from Belarus, the problem tester Tasnim Imran Sunny from Bangladesh & the editorialist Praveen Dhinwa from India, cooked up some really yummy problems for everyone and we think you all enjoyed them to the fullest. The additional flavors of the problems in the form of Russian and Mandarin translation came from the terrific trio of Sergey Kulik and Minako Kojima & Gedi Zheng respectively. We thank them al for the wonderful delicacies they cook up contest after contest.
There was everything ready to go from the problem-setting panel and it was now up to the machines to do the work. As it turned out, they broke under the pressure. We have seen it in the past and we experienced it once again. We have had load issues in the past, but we addressed them. We thought that load issue was fixed long ago. In addition, some brilliant contests in the last 6 months resurrected that belief of ours. Therefore, we got a tad bodacious and reduced our servers. Thus, after the serene period of 6 months or so, we invited mayhem upon us. The decision to reduce servers backfired and backfired badly.
The mammoth load on the servers crushed them; as a result, we crashed even before the June Cook-Off started. The questions, queries, and the quarrels started floating on all possible mediums, and we immediately realized our mistake. And we tried our best to balance the unmanageable load on two extra servers. However, by the time we did that, the efforts of our problem-setting panel were marred by the technical glitch & most importantly, the valuable time of all the participants was wasted. We did extend the contest to make up for all that, however what was gone, was gone. The contest ran smoothly after the initial bump but let us tell you that a strong learning has been taken from this, and many such incidents and we hope that such things will not be repeated in the future. And on that note, let us take you through our rank tables for the June Cook-Off 2014 and meet the patient participants who emerged triumphant.
First the non-Indian top 10:
Now the Indian top 5:
Congratulations to all the winners.
Now, the final stats of the contest:
To have such numbers in a contest that had gone through a major glitch is just incredibly pleasing and we thank you all for it.
If you want to know in detail what went wrong during the June Cook-Off 2014 you can read the blog we wrote about it, immediately after the incident took place.
Alternatively, if you want to move ahead from that memory, you can relive the glorious moments of the June Challenge 2014 with us:
In addition to the two aforementioned tales, you can also go through the editorials of our July contests to sharpen up your programming skills a bit.
That brings us to the final section of the blog. We have a lot to talk to you about and we will be doing that in our coming blog posts, as you know we have some pending. So, while we pen down the new ones, feel free to get in touch with us for all your queries & quarrels at feedback@codechef.com
You can also dial us at (022) – 30797709 (Weekday’s between 11:00 am to 8:00 pm)
Hope to catch you all soon.
Regards,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef
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