Hi everyone!

The ACM ICPC season is in full swing, and the Northwestern European Regional Contest (NWERC) is not so far away from now. This is why the University of Cambridge held a selection contest for its 9 teams to determine the best (two or more) teams that will compete for a place in the world finals. In the end, the following teams took the top 5 places in order:

1. Fin! IRO (pooya_, bogdan2412, VladGavrila)
2. Beuler (borisgrubic, lm497, dcevid)
3. Rooftop Cornflakes (eduardische, Chortos-2, Gullesnuffs)
4. Zrakomlati (PetarV, mbucic4, dsobot)
5. CRTCM (Voro94, Andip, hadesgames)

Congratulations!

The competition was held on the CodeForces platform and prepared by me and MikeMirzayanov. It was organized by University of Cambridge lecturer Dr Andrew Rice, eduardische Chortos-2 and the coach of the Latvian IOI team Sergey Melnik. The contest itself used the problem set of the Southern Subregional (NEERC) ACM ICPC quarterfinal 2013. Yes, the same quarterfinal whose online version will be held as a contest in the Codeforces gym on 27 October. ;] You may have just thought that you missed something unusual on CF, but nothing of the kind! The contest was run using a (still secret) future Codeforces tool in test mode; the name is groups.

This functionality will give the opportunity to hold contests only for a specific set of participants and spectators. A manager of the group adds users to the group and chooses their access restriction types. Only group members can participate in contests within this group, as well as observe their results. As you can see, groups are well-fit for on-site contests of various sorts. Indeed, this time we used the test version of this tool exactly for this purpose. Special thanks to MikeMirzayanov for the opportunity to try this new functionality! Now I'll leave a couple of teaser pictures for you: ;]

In conclusion, a few words about the selection itself. The number of problems solved by the top 5 teams is 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, which is a serious claim from the University of Cambridge compared to the results of the on-site of the same quarterfinal. ;] During the contest, the top three teams were engaged in an intense struggle for the first two places, but in the middle of the contest Fin! IRO made their way to the top and held a stable lead with many solved problems. Teams Beuler and Rooftop Cornflakes kept pace almost until the end of the contest, until the former solved a whole two problems in the last hour. The latter also then managed to solve two problems in the last hour, but Beuler got an accepted submission for problem D at 4:47 and secured the 2nd place, while Rooftop Cornflakes got the 3rd. The full results of the teams from Cambridge will be embedded into the results of the gym contest on the problems from the Southern (NEERC) quarterfinal.