Tomorrow, SRM 629 will be held at 11:00 EDT. This SRM is 3 weeks after the previous one (SRM 628 was on Jul 22, my birthday :D ). 3 weeks without TopCoder (except TCO14 Round 3), I'm sure that many people and I miss TopCoder too much! A sad fact that the number of SRMs is decreasing recently. After some months with 4 SRMs each, July has only 2, August has 3, and it's still not sure about next months. I don't know the reason, but it will be a great pity if there aren't any more SRMs.

I like some SRM rules. The one I like most is that the ratings will change if we open a problem. This forces us to try our best to solve problems, or our ratings will decrease much (we can't keep our ratings unchange by not making any submissions). The next one is value of a problem starts decreasing when we open it (not from the beginning of the contests). We don't have to choose which problem to solve first, and next. I also prefer to have coding and challenging phase separately, since the cost of challenging will be reduced.

I hope there will be more SRMs in the future, as many as recent months. Wishing you a wonderful SRM and high rating. Don't forget to share your thinking about TopCoder and discuss the round problems here AFTER CONTEST ENDS.

Thank you.

Is there anything wrong with CF? Many submissions are in queue now.

Today in Codeforces Round 244 (Div. 2), I found that there were too many test cases in problems C,D,E.

Problem C and E have more than 100 tests each, and problem D has about 170 tests.

As a result, the system testing phase become very slow.

Do you think that it is necessary to create such many tests? In my opinion, having more than 100 test cases doesn't make the test stronger.

What about you? Thank you.

Given N distinct points on the plane. Find the pair of point with the smallest (and largest) Euclid distance between them.

I only know the Brute-Force O(n^2) algorithm to solve this.

Can someone give me any faster algorithm?

Thanks in advance.

Given a network G=(V,E) with s and t being the source and the sink of G, respectively.

For each edge (u,v), there are two numbers c(u,v) and d(u,v). They represent the minnimum and the maximum amount of flow that can pass through the edge (u,v), respectively. I.e, the flow of edge (u,v) f(u,v) must satisfies: c(u,v)<=f(u,v)<=d(u,v).

How can I find the maximum flow from s to t?

Thanks in advance.

It's about 2 months after MemSQL start[c]up Round 2, but I have not received T-shirt. Has anyone received it? Does anyone know something about it? I'm sorry if someone finds my topic annoying but it is my very first gift/souvenir about Codeforces, so this is quite important to me to be sure about it. Regards.