Hi Codeforces!

The Hash Code 2020 World Finals took place on Saturday, April 25! 45 teams representing 22 countries qualified to participate in this virtual event. During four hours of intense competition, finalist teams made 2141 submissions. It was a close competition!

Congratulations to the winners of Hash Code 2020!

• 🥇 Past Glory, score: 6,696,284
• 🥈 simplicissimus, score: 6,478,445
• 🥉 ✷code, score: 6,238,462

View the public scoreboard here.

For those who didn't participate in the World Finals but want to try this year's challenge, we have re-opened our competition platform for an Extended Round, which can be accessed via the Judge System. Please note that you must have registered for the Hash Code 2020 Online Qualification Round and formed a team in order to take part in the Extended Round. The Extended Round will stay open until May 14 at 17:00 UTC.

As an additional bonus, we have added the problem from Hash Code 2019 Online Qualification Round on Kaggle! The problem can be accessed via the Playground Code Competition. Please note that you need to sign up for Kaggle to compete. The round will stay active until July 27 at 23:59 UTC. After this deadline it will be still possible to make submissions, however, the leaderboard will not be updated.

Have fun coding!

Your Hash Code Team

Not so long ago there appeared a comment about long queue of submissions at the time. What is even worse is the fact that polygon is also not available now. I write this blog because it is the third time, it happens when I participate in contest preparation using polygon. So to me, it seems to be a really important service, which is not as reliable as it should be. And if it is bad news for online contests, then for onsite contests which can't be delayed or rescheduled, it is a real catastrophe. As a possible solution to this problem, I'd like to point out the necessity of backups on some distant server, which availability doesn't depend on the availability of whole codeforces cluster. Is it possible to order some storage like Amazon S3 for this purpose? Looking forward to other points of view and comments on this problem and its possible solutions, especially from codeforces developers team.

Currently, both sites opencup and snarknews are unavailable, so I can't find a schedule of future contests. Does anybody know anything about one?