Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Ural Championship - flight to

The 2013 Ural Championship will take place between May 1 and May 3 in Ekaterinburg. This is an annual contest held using ACM ICPC-like rules, but this year the organizers have stepped up to make it a top-notch event, inviting many teams of the highest level. I'm currently waiting to board a plane to Ekaterniburg in the cloudy Moscow, pictured on the left.

There will be two contests. On May 1, top 5 Russian teams (as defined by NEERC results) and top 5 Chinese teams (not sure what the definition is) will face off in what seems both a unique team-of-teams competition, and also one of the last contests featuring those strong teams before they meet again in the ACM ICPC World Finals in the beginning of July.

On May 3, the Ural Championship itself will take place. In addition to 10 teams mentioned above, there will be many other strong teams from the present and from the past, including my team with Egor Kulikov and Pavel Mavrin, a past ACM ICPC World Champion team from SPb IFMO, and many others. This will be a great chance to see the best teams from the past compete against the best teams of 2013.

There will be live TV broadcast in English and Russian on May 3: http://codeforces.ru/blog/entry/7519. I will try to post updates in my blog during the entire event, except the contest(s) I will participate in myself :)

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Google Code Jam 2013 is underway!

The qualification round for Google Code Jam 2013 has started, and will run for about 20 more hours (until 4am on Sunday Moscow time). If you haven't already, you should take part. I'm involved with preparing problems for this competition, and hope you will like them :)

Note that the time when you submit your solution doesn't matter in the qualification round, so those who started before you have no unfair advantage. You just have to submit before the round ends.

Also note that you must not discuss the problems and solutions with others before the round ends. Online programming competitions are based in a large part on the honesty of their participants, so don't spoil it for everyone!