Hello CodeForces Community!

I would like to invite you all for the July Cook-Off 2017 (https://www.codechef.com/COOK84)! Five challenging problems will be waiting for you to be cracked during the contest.

Joining me on the problem setting panel are:

• Problem Setter: Xsquare (Prateek Gupta) and Sundar (Sundar Annamalai)
• Problem Tester: PraveenDhinwa (Praveen Dhinwa) and arjunarul (Arjun Arul)
• Editorialist: Xsquare (Prateek Gupta)
• Russian Translator: CherryTree (Sergey Kulik)
• Mandarin Translator: huzecong (Hu Zecong)
• Vietnamese Translator: VNOI Team
• Contest Admin: Kamil Debowski (Errichto)

I hope you will enjoy solving them. Please give your feedback on the problem set in the comments below after the contest.

Now, without further ado, let me share the contest details with you real quick:

Time: 23rd July 2017 (2130 hrs) to 24th July 2017 (0000 hrs). (Indian Standard Time — +5:30 GMT) — Check your timezone.

Details: https://www.codechef.com/COOK84

Registration: You just need to have a CodeChef handle to participate. For all those, who are interested and do not have a CodeChef handle, are requested to register in order to participate.

Prizes: * Top 10 performers in Global and Indian category will get CodeChef laddus, with which the winners can claim cool CodeChef goodies. Know more here: https://www.codechef.com/laddu. (For those who have not yet got their previous winning, please send an email to [email protected])

Hello everyone,

I hope you all are doing well. I would like to share few things.

Since, I graduated from the college, I have not been getting much time to participate in the contests. It's actually difficult to take out a full stretched and dedicated time of around 2-3 hours for a contest, when you are doing a job. But anyways, I still try to participate in gym/team contests with my team mate hagu over weekends. It has always been my aim to contribute the best to the sport programming network. There is always a desire to somehow continue this sport in several ways. Setting and Testing problems on platforms including CodeChef, HackerRank and HackerEarth is one such way.

Well, one fine day I along with some of my juniors, felt of writing a blog on Competitive programming. The blog is named TechParoksha and contains around seven topics as of now. It is mostly known as the IIITA Programming Blog on Quora. The blog posts covers each topic in detail. However, each post may not cover everything regarding that particular topic. So, it will be released in several parts. I hope you enjoy reading the blog post even if you are a master of that topic. We will keep releasing new articles and posts as and when we are ready.

I hope the blog encourages the increasing programming culture of India much more and lot of enthusiastic people find their passion in the form of sport programming.

I will like to mention some of my juniors who have helped me in expanding the blogs to wider audience by writing about the topics they are passionate about.

• m17
• dragonslayerx
• ayush_awasthi
• pratham2508
• lucifer2709

Thanks, hagu for reviewing the articles before they were published.

Please, click the below link to view the TechParoksha blog.
https://tp-iiita.quora.com/

Follow the blog to receive updates for the tutorial of newly written topics.

Happy Coding !

Hello everyone.

I know you all the passionate people out here, must be waiting for the next good contest to take place. Hence, I invite you all to participate in this months' April Contest. The contest is titled as Awesome April.

The problem set has been prepared by ma5termind and its tested by me. I assure everyone would find problems of their respective taste. I would like to thank MDCCXXIX for assigning me to be the tester of this contest. The main character of the problem is Xsquare, and you have to help him in solving the different tasks.

The awesome editorials prepared by phantom11 are ready to be served just after the contest ends. To your surprise, Hackerearth has now introduced a unique feature in which you can rate the editorial of a particular problem after you read it. I would also like to thank Vivek Prakash and Sachin Gupta for providing me an amazing platform to share my algorithmic ideas all over.

UPD:

First three people on the global leaderboard will get some amazing cash prizes worth 100$ overall. To be more precise.

Global Prizes:-

• First on the leaderboard gets prize money worth 50$
• Second one gets prize money worth 30$
• Third person gets prize money worth 20$
• Also, the top 5 participants in the contest will be awarded with cool HE T-shirts.

Other Prizes:-

Not only that, Top three Indians on the leaderboard will also get HE T-shirts

Some Important links for the contest details are mentioned here below:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1691560331071537/
https://www.hackerearth.com/awesome-april-15/

Wishing all of you, very good luck. See you all on the leaderboard.

Hello everyone, I invite you all to participate in the ICPC warm up contest prepared by me. I tried to keep the problemset with full of variety, and the problems as interesting as they could be. Hope you enjoy competing. Register here in the below mentioned link. All the details regarding the timings are mentioned in this link only.

Thanks to Tester: akashdeep and Editorialist: phantom11 for helping me prepare this contest.

Contest Link

Time Zone

Happy Coding! :)

UPD:
Contest Ended.
Thanks for the participation.
I hope you enjoyed the problems.

People who finished first 6 positions in the Leaderboard.

anta
sugim48
PraveenDhinwa
adurysk
Balajiganapathi
Xellos

Editorials have been served.
You can discuss the problems here, or on comments section in the practice link.

http://codeforces.net/gym/100494/attachments

Here is the link of the contest problems, I want to discuss problem F here. People have made very few submissions for this problem, may be just because its difficult to catch the greedy part here.

Anyways, never mind. I gave it a try like everyone else did and thought of a backtrack solution. http://ideone.com/8h8X4v (This is the link for my code).

I dont know how to mantain a state here.

The only state I can think of is F(t,mask,vector spent) where t denotes time elapsed till now, mask denotes which all bugs have been fixed (set bits for the fixed bugs) and vector spent would denote an array which would keep the count as in how much time, we have wasted on ith problem.

But, seems the problem can be solved by keeping a different state. Instead of vector spent, they say, you can just keep an overall time elapsed on fixing all the unfixed bugs, why is it so!