Hello Codeforces community! I'm happy to invite you to participate in Codeforces Round #269 for Division 2 which will be held this Friday, September 26th. As usual first division coders are invited to participate unofficially, I would appreciate a lot if they will join.
All problems are mine, so if you won't like them... well, you know whom to blame for those. I did my best in order not to disappoint you.
Since this is my first round, let me introduce myself. I'm 27, have around 7 years of programming experience and was never into ACM/ICPC and stuff like that before, learned words like "dynamic programming" couple of years ago from the algorithms course on Coursera and a bit later found this site. I'm from Saint Petersburg, Russia, was born and lived here until I became 24. Then I got married and me and my wife decided to go live somewhere else and we moved to Kyiv, Ukraine, and we love that city a lot and we will return there some day, hopefully soon.
I hope you will find my problem set interesting and varied. Meanwhile let me get you prepared for the round and introduce you the guys you will help to. So the heroes of my round are three animals from Saint Petersburg and Kyiv zoos. Those are Menshikov and Uslada ("Uslada" means Delight in Russian) — polar bears, symbols of Saint Petersburg zoo. These are my favourite animals of that zoo, they can do a moonwalk dance. Their third friend would be Khoras — an elephant from the Kyiv zoo, not sure what kind of dances he likes but he was very friendly last time we've been there. I was always fond of polar bears and elephants so now I have a round with them! Hope you will remember their names, in problem statements I call them by name and by animal type interchangeably. They want the friendship to exist between their countries and they have some minor problems you can help them with.
Traditional and untraditional regards for this round go to:
MikeMirzayanov and the entire team of Codeforces for the site,
Gerald for his help with the problems,
Maria Belova aka Delinur for the translation of the statements,
last but definitely not least, my wife Tanya for her infinite support in everything I do. This round wouldn't be here without her.
Wikipedia asked me to remind you that the day we'll have the round (at least in Russian tome zone and time zones close to it) is 269th day of the year, matches the round number perfectly thanks to Gerald's scheduling skill.
If you read up (down?) to here and I still have your attention then let me know the secret every non-red coder wants to know — in order to become red you need to solve at least 1513 problems on this site. That's a personal experience, trust me.
Another thing I'd like to mention here: gojira was cheating! In his round announcement he mentioned that he's taking the 'eldest problem setter' title from Sammarize but he didn't mention his age, so I can't tell whether this title should be mine or not. gojira, please let us know ASAP!
Will see you on the round and I will appreciate a feedback (both positive and negative) a lot!
P.S.: as usual the scoring will be announced closer to the start time, hopefully my memory won't fail and I will update this blog post then.
upd 0: small update for the English version. In English statements the names of the characters will be Menshykov, Uslada and Horace, don't get surprised :-)
upd 1: scoring will be a bit different from normal today: 500, 1000, 2000, 2000, 2500
Thanks to everybody who was with us today, hope you enjoyed it! My congratulations to the winners. worse didn't take part in today's contest so the fight was tough on both sides of the table. While Menshykov and Uslada are updating the ratings, Horace is finishing the editorial, he's promising it will be ready a bit later today.
I understood and noted some mistakes of mine in this contest, but please let me know if you have anything to tell about it. I like how it's started, thanks for beating the 5K record, that's awesome.
Unfortunately nobody solved E, though hos.lyric was very close to it. His solution failed on the second to last test, which I didn't consider to be a max test. I consider this to be my mistake that I underestimated the problem, otherwise I would leave it for some next contest.
Best regards,
Will see you at some next round,
Marat.
