gKseni's blog

By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

Hooray! Contest for the best motto for laptop stickers is completed!

Thank you all for participation :) The Codeforces team was excited watching for your proposals and votes. Some proposals were really funny or wittily connected with popular memes: one, two :)

Congratulations to Rudy1444! His ``Is it rated?'' scored the highest number of votes. We'll be happy to send him a set of stickers and brand Codeforces t-shirt!

We will distribute stickers personally at events organized by the Codeforces and send them as a nice bonus to t-shirts and other gifts.

As a result of the voting the following proposals go to factory:

Thanks!

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

It is time to choose the best mottos!

We've chosen some proposals from the community and the Codeforces team. You will find them as the first comments for the post.

Vote for your favorite!
The final results will be announced two days later, on Friday, November 18! ;)

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

The international training camp to prepare for ACM-ICPC 2016 is running on the base of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Moscow International Workshop ACM ICPC 2016 is open educational and training student meeting for sports programming which takes part for the 7th time. The meeting has started on the 8th of November and will continue until the 18th of November.

Remember that two month ago already in Codeforces were written about technical details of the camp. It consists of 9 working days in English with daily contests (the main moderator of these contests is the coordinator of Open Cup named by E.V. Pankratiev, the chief editor of Snarknews: Oleg Khristenko); tutorials, lectures, practice time and evening activities — sports, excursions, etc.

Teams from 13 countries take part in the camp: Belarus, Great Britain, Georgia, India, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, USA, Ukraine and Russia. Overall about 200 participants from 40 universities in 31 cities in the world visit autumn meetings. The final list of teams is here.

It is interesting to see the topics of lectures of the division B, the list of invited speakers, a short schedule and the list of excursions. Details are in a colorful English-language booklet of the meeting.

Botan Investments Fund is one of partners who provides the financial support. In addition, they helped teams from Saratov, Tomsk, Archangelsk to come to the training camp. And I am very pleased that, thanks to the support of BI from Saratov State University two teams could go on the meeting. Thank you! Now I can cheer twice more during the contest! :) Also Botan Investments Fund provided the lecture «Startups are the new Sexy. Growth Hacking » in English from the co-founder of Machine Learning Works, Grigory Tkachenko.

The results of the rounds:

On snarknews there are all results with the description and references.

There are several photos:

Can't download http://assets.codeforces.com/files/mipt-fall-2016/photos1/list.txt [tried twice].

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

Hello all,

Codeforces announces contest for the best motto (slogan) for laptop stickers!

Motto is a short catchy and creative slogan/tagline. It should relate to programming contests/problems. It will be great if everybody who sees our stickers gets to know how programming contests are cool! We are looking for motto in English.

Write your mottos in comments, vote for your favorite! The writer of the best motto will get a set of new stickers :-)

The results will be announced on November, 14. We will take into account number of votes and opinion of the Codeforces Team.

Good luck!

UPD: Thank you for your proposals! I've already started to draw some of them. Which ones? Let's save intrigue: the final stage of the contest with proposals from the community and the Codeforces team is waiting! ;)

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

Marek marek.cygan Cygan from the University of Warsaw will allocate the ERC grant – 1,4 million euro to work on algorithms. “Technology transfer between modern algorithmic paradigms” is the name of his research project which will be carried out at the University of Warsaw.

Before Marek Cygan became an academic teacher he was taking part in IT competitions. In 2005 he won Google Code Jam. Two years later together with Marcin Pilipczuk and Filip Wolski won the ACM-ICPC in Tokio.. As a Phd student of Institute of Informatics of the University of Warsaw Marek Cygan got a 3rd place in TopCoder Open in Las Vegas.

He received many scholarships from the state institutions, among others, from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Foundation for Polish Science and the National Science Centre. Young scientist was participating also in two academic programmes at UW: the Modern University and the Doctorates for Mazovia.

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

On the 26th of September there was the second session with Bill Paucher on the Quora. There were less questions, but answers were not less interesting. For example, three of them:

What are the pre-requisites for starting competitive programming aimed at developing strong coding skills?

I really don’t know. Look at the works of the younger generations of the ICPC extended family (pretty much everything out their on the Internet that relates to sports programming). But let me give it a try, assuming you don’t have resources.

  • Start by building a small club.
  • Start recruiting the best professor teaching data structures and algorithms. Don’t look at credentials. Talk to the upperclass students.
  • Start training sessions. Contact others via the Internet. Go to The ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest for some leads.
  • Start by attending a competitive programming workshop that lasts a few days or a week. Contact ICPC regional directors and coaches for advice.
  • Start competing in the many on-line contests and sign up through your coach to compete in the ICPC regional.
  • Start competing on-site at the ICPC regional. Don’t worry about your level of competition. The ICPC is a team sport. Everyone is at different levels. Team members support each other. So it fits that they are typically delighted to share what they have learned with other teams.
  • Start today.

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By gKseni, 8 years ago, translation, In English

ACM-ICPC World Finals Reunion Dinner was on 16th of September in the Stanford University. Vladimir Yakunin, the participant of ICPC 2005 and 2010, engineer of Google, shared his impressions about this meeting:

The organizer, Doug Mohr, invited us to one of Stanford buildings. Yet on the parking I met Roman Chadnov, my friend from Tomsk. We entered the building and asked where the event was. It turned out that there were several of them. Finally we found out the garden mainly thick of young people in jeans and t-shirts who got together and didn’t pay attention to others. Many of them had badges of Google and Facebook members. Our!

In the far end of the garden there was a bar which, however, was not so popular. Waiters scurried about the programmers and offered various snacks (mmm, tunny was amazing!!!). All people fastened on their badges (actually not to make the acquaintance of everyone) and sorted out, apparently, according to linguistic/geographical features. Russian group quickly became too much and divided into two. Also there were more than one Chinese group.

Apart from expected friends (Andrey Lasarev, Artem Rahov and Sergei Rogulenko from Saratov; Slava Isenbaev, Roman Elizarov, Dmitriy Dgulgakov and others) I surprisingly met several people who also take part in ICPC: Ilya Mironov — Vice World Champion of 1998, a colleague from Google and well-known in narrow circles player in the «What?Where?When?».Alex Grusheckiy who sits in 10 meters away from me at work, also was among them. Of course, you can guess that the team from Vitalik Goldstein and Petit Mitrichev coincidentally is not gathering.

Andrey Lasarev, Vladimir Yakunin, Alex Grusheckiy

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