Meta Hacker Cup Finals
Good morning! The Meta Hacker Cup Finals are coming up in a few weeks, and will be held on December 10th. The contest will be 4 hours long, starting at 6:30 AM, PST, with a streamed scoreboard reveal at 11:00 AM, 30 minutes after the contest ends.
In the first ever Meta Hacker Cup Finals, the top 25 programmers of the over 16,000 entrants who competed in the first 4 rounds will battle it out on the hardest problem set of the season for a $20,000 grand prize. Contestants will have 4 hours to solve as many of programming challenges as they can of the 5 to 8 algorithmic tasks which will be revealed when the contest starts.
The scoreboard reveal will be streamed to the the Hacker Cup Facebook page, with commentary from SecondThread and Zef RosnBrick.
The 25 Finalists
| Round 3 Place | Handle | Max Rating | Current Rating | tourist factor* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Benq | 3797 | 3584 | 25.97% |
| 2 | ecnerwala | 3668 | 3187 | 14.3% |
| 3 | tourist | 3979 | 3817 | 50% |
| 4 | jqdai0815 | 3681 | 3466 | 15.25% |
| 5 | ksun48 | 3654 | 3452 | 13.34% |
| 6 | maroonrk | 3637 | 3436 | 12.25% |
| 7 | scott_wu | 3350 | 3195 | 2.61% |
| 8 | ACRush | 3047 | 3047 | 0.47% |
| 9 | duality | 3268 | 3268 | 1.64% |
| 10 | Um_nik | 3629 | 3504 | 11.77% |
| 11 | jiangly | 3754 | 3591 | 21.5% |
| 12 | Rewinding | 3659 | 3498 | 13.68% |
| 13 | Radewoosh | 3720 | 3438 | 18.38% |
| 14 | TLE | 3374 | 3178 | 2.98% |
| 15 | neal | 3147 | 2948 | 0.82% |
| 16 | mnbvmar | 3509 | 3297 | 6.26% |
| 17 | noimi | 3235 | 3209 | 1.36% |
| 18 | heno239 | 3385 | 3385 | 3.17% |
| 19 | stevenkplus | 2874 | 2830 | 0.17% |
| 20 | qwerty787788 | 3038 | 2698 | 0.44% |
| 21 | arvindf232 | 2814 | 2667 | 0.12% |
| 22 | y0105w49 | 2925 | 2867 | 0.23% |
| 23 | yutaka1999 | 3190 | 3190 | 1.05% |
| 24 | hitonanode | 3107 | 3107 | 0.66% |
| 25 | krijgertje | 3001 | 2900 | 0.36% |
*An individual's tourist factor is defined as the probability that this person would perform better than tourist in a Codeforces round, as predicted by the Elo Rating System.
Max Elo or Current Elo?
Here's a graph of all finalist's Round 3 place vs. their current elo and max elo. Although both current and max elo are useful predictors of performance in Hacker Cup, max elo has a higher R^2 coefficient, meaning it appears to be a better predictor.
See you in the Stream!
I'd like to draw a bit of attention to a blog I published last year asking for support for Facebook Livestreams on Codeforces. It looks like there was some initial interest in adding support for it, but it appears it isn't quite finished. If there's anything I can do to help make this happen, please reach out to me on CF DMs.
I hope to see you in the finals stream! We've had some great problems this year; perhaps you can find some of the ones you most liked or struggled with in the image below: 
