Please don't shoot the messenger.

https://ioinformatics.org/news/ioi-response-to-the-conflict-in-gaza/52

We’re excited to share that the Universal Cup Summer Summit 2024, sponsored by Huawei, just wrapped up in the beautiful Cancun, Mexico!

The highlight of the event was the 2nd Universal Cup Semifinal, where 200 teams competed both onsite and online.

A huge shoutout to all our onsite teams:

Gold Medal

• USA1 (ecnerwala, ksun48, tourist)

Silver Medal

• Polish Mafia (Swistakk, Radewoosh, Marcin_smu)

Bronze Medal

• HoMaMaOvO (maroonrk, maspy, hos.lyric)

Honourable Mention

• 03 Slimes (orzdevinwang, Rewinding, TLE)
• Amstelpark (PavelKunyavskiy, cdkrot, LHiC)
• Let it Rot (skip2004, p_b_p_b, Warriors_fsy)
• Almost Retired Dandelion (Um_nik, Merkurev, KAN)
• yosupo (yosupo, sigma425, sugim48)
• Speed Star (YoshikaMiyafuji, noimi)
• Yolki-palki (Pechalka, Kapt, Tikhon228)
• Mei Dui Yao (PubabaOnO, froggyzhang)

And our top ten online teams:

Online Champions

• UT a.k.a Is (yutaka1999, yokozuna57, HIR180)

First Prize (places 2-3)

• 飞带长队 (275307894a, A_zjzj, crazy_sea)
• 哈姆？哈姆！ (njwrz, qiuzx, sjcsjcsjc)

Second Prize (places 4-10)

• tritr (tute7627, asdsasd, SPD_9X2)
• japan406364961 (kotatsugame, Nyaan, risujiroh)
• Dvoe protiv vetra (Egor, pashka, qwerty787788)
• TEMP team name (liuhengxi)
• open your brain (aaaaawa, wygzgyw, Blood_Wu_Ren)
• 我再也不会笑了 (IceYukino, pp_orange, flying)
• Nemesis (-14, Imakf, zhangjianjuncd)

You can check out the full results here: https://contest.ucup.ac/contest/1708/standings

If you are interested in the solutions of the problems and stories behind the problem setting: We are going to release a post-contest analysis report soon! We will post it after we finish it.

We also invite you to watch the streams from the semifinal:

• English stream
• Chinese stream

For more info about the Universal Cup and how to join the fun, visit our website at https://ucup.ac/. If you’re interested in participating this season, head over to the Registration page.

Thanks to everyone who joined us and made this event amazing! In particular, huge thanks to all the organizers:

• chenjb
• Qingyu
• xiaowuc1
• lperovskaya
• PavelKunyavskiy
• Dup4
• and kostka :)

Finally here are some pics with the spectacular Semifinal Champions:

See you next time!

... has started today. Best of luck to all the participants!

Is anyone aware of any mirror?

The website: https://ceoi2024.fi.muni.cz/

EJOI 2024 is scheduled to take place in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, from August 16th to August 22nd, 2024.

The next update is scheduled for 12 January 2024, when we plan to announce the new ICPC World Finals schedule. The World Finals will not be scheduled before April 2024.

Today is January 13th. Did I miss something, or have they not announced anything yet?

Happy New Year to everyone who's already stepped into 2024, and to those of us still hanging out in 2023! I usually like to spend a bit of time looking back at the year that's been. So, let's dive into this little trip down memory lane together and see what 2023 had in store for us!

• On January 19th, the Universal Cup was launched as an alternative to the OpenCup, primarily to facilitate systematic training for teams with a focus on preparing for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). In its inaugural season, the Universal Cup attracted participation from 750 teams, representing over 300 organizations worldwide, which participated in 22 stages.
• From February 18th to 26th, the first edition of the Osijek Competitive Programming Camp took place. A total of 74 teams participated, with 13 teams attending the event in person in Osijek, Croatia. The second edition of the camp occurred in September.
• Also in February, Google announced the discontinuation of its Coding Competitions (Code Jam, Kick Start, and Hash Code) after two decades. The final, farewell rounds were conducted on April 15th.
• Around the same period, it was revealed that the Topcoder Open 2023 would be the final event of its series, initially planned to be held virtually. However, this virtual event was later canceled entirely.
• The 3rd European Girls' Olympiad in Informatics was held from July 15th to 21st in Lund, Sweden. The event saw participation from approximately 50 delegations, with prvocislo from Slovakia emerging as the winner.
• The International Olympiad in Informatics 2023 took place from August 28th to September 4th in Szeged, Hungary. The competition was narrowly won by Rebelz from China, with a one-point margin over fellow Chinese competitor cnnfls_csy. Additionally, it was announced that IOI 2026 would be hosted in Uzbekistan.
• A week later, the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics was held in Kutaisi, Georgia, from September 8th to 14th, marking the 7th edition and the first on-site event post-pandemic. The winner was andreystefanov from Bulgaria.
• On September 8th and 9th, the AtCoder World Finals were conducted in Tokyo, Japan. This event marked the first significant international open on-site competition post-pandemic, featuring top competitors from AtCoder Race Rankings between 2019 and 2022. jiangly secured victory, earning a prize of ¥500,000.
• On October 27th, the ICPC World Finals organizers announced the postponement of the 2022-2023 World Finals, initially scheduled for November 12-17 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to late Q1 or early Q2 of 2024, with exact dates yet to be confirmed.
• The Yandex Cup World Finals took place on December 2nd in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The algorithmic competition was won by ksun48 of Canada, who received a grand prize of ₽500,000.
• Finally, on December 9th, the final round of Meta Hacker Cup (formerly Facebook Hacker Cup) was held as an online event. The winner, tourist, achieved a perfect score of 100 points, claiming a $20,000 prize.

I skipped some of the smaller events, for instance APIO or ICPC regionals, as I tried to keep only the biggest event for each audience. Please let me know in the comments if I forgot about something else.

Thanks for reading and being a part of this community!

Is there any website where I can find statements/tests from past ICPC regionals? Can be unofficial as well. I found https://icpcarchive.github.io/, but a lot of contests are missing and they don't have tests.

IOI 2023 starts tomorrow in Szeged, Hungary!

I usually try to create a list of participants before the competition starts, but this year I was pretty busy, so minhcool created one here: https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/116735.

I still wanted to do something, but as the official list of participants was also published, I decided to make an aggregated list using both of these sources and for the first time I was able to use the photos of the participants.

Enjoy: https://kostka.dev/ioi/23/

If something is incorrect or missing (sometimes I wasn't able to match the Codeforces handles to the names), let me know here.

Does it mean that FHC is cancelled as well?

I want to try something new. We are preparing a publication with solutions to some of the problems from the Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics and I want to include some problems from the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics as well. As I have never seen these problems, I need to spend some time to familiarize myself with them. Normally I would solve them on my own, but maybe I can try to stream my attempts and implement these solutions live.

This is going to be a completely new experience for me and it might be a complete disaster, but at least I hope it is going to be entertaining in a way. I am also a bit rusty, but I hope I can handle the problems for juniors. Feel free to join me to say hi, or to tell me why you think I am very annoying.

https://twitch.tv/kostkadev (I plan to start at 5pm UTC on Aug 7th)

Update: VOD can be found here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1892596888. I had fun so maybe I will continue it at some point.

(source)

:q

Don't you think that most of the current programming competitions are boring and monotonous? Can you think of something that could be more entertaining, especially for the viewers?

Let's brainstorm together. You can do whatever you want! How about extremely long 24-hour rounds? 5v5 match-ups with 10 computers? Or maybe a timer that starts at 1 hour at the beginning of the competition and goes up only if you solve a problem, so you literally fight only against the clock and see your rivals being eliminated? Alternatively, is there something from the existing competitions that you really enjoy and don't want to lose?

... takes place in Sweden this week. The scoreboard is available here: https://egoi23.se/scoreboard/

I am not aware of any mirrors.

It was announced that EJOI 2023 will take place in Kutaisi, Georgia between September 8th and 14th.

https://ejoi2023.kiu.edu.ge/

This is a follow-up to https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/113201.

It was announced in this month's town hall: https://youtu.be/QXmI7QV5FP0 (starts at min 16), that the finals will not be conducted at all.

I had a very heated debate with Radewoosh about how we should colour-code some of the results.

We both agree that the "Accepted" result has to be green and "Wrong answer" has to be red. But we had slightly different opinions about "Time limit exceeded". Surprisingly we both found people that agreed with our views. I don't want to bias you in any way, so I am not going to say it here, but what colour do you see when you think "TLE"? What about "Runtime Error" / "Memory Limit Exceeded" / "Compilation Error" / "Pending Judgement"?

Do they still take place? The website has been down since forever and I cannot find any info.

The Advent of Code 2022 just started!

Remember when I asked if you would be interested in buying a book about the sports programming?

It's been a long journey and there's even a preprint version of this book sitting on my desk. But then I realized that I would hate myself if I tried to profit from this book. It contains a lot of knowledge that was shared with me by some of the members of this community. Therefore I decided to share the PDF for free, for everyone.

This book is a collection of algorithms and data structures used in sports programming that I found interesting with example problems from various past competitions. I also tried to describe various competitions and platforms. Hope some of you will find it helpful!

Obviously, the book may contain some errors (in particular please note that English is my third language). If you want to help, please let me know about them! I would love to fix them and then share a corrected version in the future. I might even send you a thank-you postcard or a physical copy of this book. The feedback form is available on my website, alongside the book.

Enjoy!

I believe it went a little bit unnoticed here, so let me congratulate the Top Coder Open 2022 winners:

• First place and $10000: tourist (for the fifth time!)
• Second place and $3500: maroonrk
• Third place and $500: ecnerwala

And congrats to Psyho on his 7th win in the Marathon track!

In Sharm El Sheikh. It was announced on the stream.

From ICPC regional rules:

The ICPC World Finals cycle is still affected by the pandemic, and the ICPC World Finals Dhaka in November 2022 is for the teams qualified from the regional year 2020/21. To come back on track the ICPC is planning to determine the two World Championships for the regional years 2021/22 and 2022/23 simultaneously at the same event with separate acknowledgement of champions and medalists. The target date for this event is the last week of November 2023.

And further:

A student may compete in only one of these two Championships.

A qualified student on different teams that qualify for ICPC World Finals 2022 and ICPC World Finals 2023 will participate on the team qualifying for the 2023 World Finals. The coach of the team qualifying for the 2022 World Finals may request a qualified replacement. Details later.

In short: "TCO22 Finals has been moved to an all virtual event. Due to the lack of finalists able to join in person, we had to make the call to not have a full scale, in person TCO. "

Full article: https://discussions.topcoder.com/discussion/22462/2022-topcoder-open-finals-announcement-change-of-plans

Round F starts in less than an hour! See you on the scoreboard!

http://goo.gle/KS-2022-F

All the delegations participating in EJOI 2022 have been published: https://olympiads.jsoft.am/Olympiads/Details/45#