I'm honored to announce that Codeforces round #459 is going to take place on January 29th and Reyna and I are the problemsetters of this round.

I'd like to thank keyvankhademi, AlexFetisov, winger, Belonogov, cyand1317 and demon1999, AnPelec for testing, KAN for coordinating the round and MikeMirzayanov for the great Codeforces and Polygon platforms.

The main characters of the round are Stranger Things characters.

The scoring distribution will be announced soon.

Good luck and have fun.

UPD0: The round is over, we hope you enjoyed it. Editorial will be posted soon.

UPD1: System testing is over, congratulations to the winners.

Div.1 winners are:

1. jqdai0815
2. FizzyDavid
3. ainta
4. aid
5. Swistakk

And Div.2 winners are:

1. Omar_Morsi
2. Chaarzeh (Interesting :-?)
3. magicalCycloidea
4. Tanzir5
5. UoA_Kanade

The editorial will be posted in a bit.

UPD2: Here's the editorial. Also please help me and Reyna do better next time by filling out this form.

I think it's good time for collecting teams that are going to WF this year. Let's complete the table together :)

Europe

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Hello Codeforces!

I would like to invite you to CodeCraft-18, which will take place on Saturday, 20th January, 9:05 PM IST. This is a combined Div. 1 + Div. 2 round and is rated for participants of both divisions.

CodeCraft-18 is part of Felicity, IIIT Hyderabad's most awaited set of events, Threads. With a plethora of intellectually engaging online contests in various fields of programming, mathematics and general knowledge, Threads is a celebration of the spirit of computing and engineering. Other than CodeCraft, we have the Project Euler-style contest Gordian Knot and a jeopardy-style CTF event called Break In, amongst other events.

I would like to thank the CodeCraft team -- FundamentalEq, RohanRTiwari, additya1998, aman_shahi2, born2rule, codelegend, crvineeth97, deepanshugarg, devanshg27, mprocks, nir123 and virus_1010 -- for their amazing work in problemsetting. I would also like to thank vintage_Vlad_Makeev for helping us prepare the problems, and MikeMirzayanov for the great Codeforces and Polygon platforms.

Prizes

• Top 20 participants win Codeforces T-shirts
• Top 5 participants from India win Codeforces T-shirts

You will be given 8 problems and 3 hours to solve them. The scoring distribution will be announced later. Good luck!

Update: Scoring is 500 — 1000 — 1500 — 2000 — 2500 — 3000 — 3500 — 3750

Update 2: We would like to apologize about problem F and G, which turned out to be easier than we expected, and about the mistake in the statement of H.

Congrats to the winners!

Top 20:
1. SkyDec
2. Syloviaely
3. matthew99
4. dotorya
5. FizzyDavid
6. laofudasuanbaofushehui
7. ikatanic
8. jcvb
9. Um_nik
10. molamola.
11. rajat1603
12. geniucos
13. MrDindows
14. Radewoosh
15. pavel.savchenkov
16. shanquan2
17. 613
18. JOHNKRAM
19. mxh1999
20. satyaki3794

Top 5 in India:
1. rajat1603
2. satyaki3794
3. jtnydv25
4. akulsareen
5. akashdeep

The editorial is ready!

Hello Codeforces! Some months ago I wrote tutorial about basics of recurrent sequences. This blog, my second tutorial is about mine another favorite topic — Invariants and Monovariants. These are useful concepts which will help you solving problems, especially, constructive ones. Even if you are not familiar with this topics, I'm sure that you solved problems with use of invariants and monovariants without knowing it, continue reading, you will understand my point :) There will be hard problems which are based on old IMO problems, so I will try my best to explain solutions of examples.

So, what are Invariants and Monovariants? An invariant is a quantity that doesn't change. A monovariant is a quantity that changes monotically (that is, non-decreasing or non-increasing). Seems simple, yes?

Let's start with a few easy examples which you will better understand its point. I suggest you to try solving problems by your own before reading solution.

Hello Codeforces!

I'm proud to announce that Codeforces Round #457 (Div. 2) will be held on 19 Jan, 14:35 UTC. The problemset is authored by southball, longhuenchan and me (STommydx). It is our first round in Codeforces and hope you all find the problems interesting.

We would like to thank the following people as the round would not be possible without their kind help: vintage_Vlad_Makeev for coordinating the round, Arpa for testing the problems and MikeMirzayanov for the great Polygon and Codeforces platform.

The contest will consist of 5 problems and you'll be given 2 hours to solve them. The scoring distribution will be announced close to the start of the round as tradition.

Let me close this blog post by answering the most frequently asked question in Codeforces. This round is rated for all Div. 2 participants. As usual, Div. 1 participants can join out of competition.

Good luck and high ratings!

UPD:

Scoring distribution: 500-1000-1500-2250-2500

UPD2:

We are extremely sorry for the situation for problem B. We are figuring out a correct solution for problem B. I hope you all enjoy the rest of the problems.

UPD3:

The round is over. Congratulates to the winners!

Div2:

1. ustatt
2. HanaElhami
3. SorryBahadir
4. ntv
5. Om_nik

Div1+2:

1. eddy1021
2. chemthan
3. nhho
4. fmota
5. ustatt

The editorial will be available tomorrow.

UPD4:

Editorial is ready!

Hello Codeforces!

On January 13, 16:05 MSK Educational Codeforces Round 36 will start.

Series of Educational Rounds continue being held as Harbour.Space University initiative! You can read the details about the cooperation between Harbour.Space University and Codeforces in the blog post.

This round will be (traditionally now) rated for Div. 2. It will be held on extented ACM ICPC rules. After the end of the contest you will have one day to hack any solution you want. You will have access to copy any solution and test it locally.

You will be given 7 problems and 2 hours to solve them.

The problems were prepared by Mikhail awoo Piklyaev, Ivan BledDest Androsov, Sergey sslotin Slotin and me.

Good luck to all participants!

I also have a message from our partners, Harbour.Space University:

As we get ready to dive into the second week of the year, we want to update you all on the upcoming Hello India x Russia Programming Bootcamp! So far 25 teams have registered, with more signing up daily.

As a reminder, the boot camp will take place from March 22nd to March 30th, 2018, at the Amrita School of Engineering campus, India. The Coordinator of the Programming Committee, and head coach will be two time ACM-ICPC world vice-champion Gleb GlebsHP Evstropov.

You can find more information and registration, click here

For those of you who need financial support for the boot camp, please fill up the register form, then we will contact you and prepare an official sponsorship request letter for you to present to your University, University’s IT partners or your potential employer.

Congratulations to the winners:

Congratulations to the best hackers:

2023 successful hacks and 1300 unsuccessful hacks were made in total!

And finally people who were the first to solve each problem:

UPD Editorial

Hello 2018!

If you're still thinking what to do on the eighth day of year 2018, pay attention! The first round for both divisions of the new year starts on January 8 at 17:35 Moscow time (what about other timezones?).

Four important components of Hello 2018 will be the same as in Good Bye 2017:

• Div1 + Div2 combined
• 8 problems
• 2 hours 30 minutes
• Rated

But there will also be a substantial difference:

• Different problems

The problems of this round have been proposed and prepared by YakutovDmitriy, budalnik and myself.

Thanks to everyone without whom this round wouldn't be possible as well: AlexFetisov, Golovanov399, KAN, MikeMirzayanov, PavelKunyavskiy, qwerty787788, VArtem, winger.

Good luck!

Scoring distribution: 500 — 750 — 1000 — 1250 — 1750 — 2250 — 3000 — 3500.

Problem tutorial can be found here.

Congratulations to the winners!

1. Um_nik
2. desert97
3. yosupo
4. dotorya
5. zeliboba
6. FizzyDavid
7. Endagorion
8. .o.
9. SpyCheese
10. Kostroma

Hey, Codeforces!

Hope that the last few days were quite productive for all of you in terms of rest and pleasure. Time to forget about messing with handle colors and get back to coding!

I'm proud to usher the first contest of the year — Codeforces Round #456, which is going to be held on Friday, 17:35 MSK. The round will be rated for all division 2 participants. Anyway, we will be glad to see whoever decides to join us out-of-competition :)

The authors are — GreenGrape and rek (don't worry, it's all about New Year magic ^^). My heartfelt gratitude to Kolya (KAN) for his invaluable help in round coordination, Grisha (vintage_Vlad_Makeev) and Oleg (xen) for testing and correcting statements, Dima (cdkrot) and Gleb (Glebodin) for preliminary solving, AmirReza (Arpa) for close reading and Mike (MikeMirzayanov) for awesome Codeforces and Polygon platforms.

We look forward to brightening up your cold winter evening :)

GL & HF!

UPD. There will be five problems with the following scoring:
500 — 1000 — 1750 — 2000 — 2500
As usual, it's strictly recommended to look through all problems :)

UPD. Please note that the registration was delayed for a few hours.

UPD. The contest is over.
It turned out to be a little bit more complicated than we expected. Still we hope you learned something new :)

UPD. Editorial!

UPD. Congratulations to the winners!

Div. 2:

1. apink
2. anger_of_singledogs
3. stepfather
4. supy
5. Ratel

Div. 1 (unofficial):

1. dotorya
2. ksun48
3. irkstepanov
4. Benq
5. quailty