Hello CodeForces! This year again, I'd like to invite you to the online mirror of an open championship of Switzerland called the Helvetic Coding Contest. A mirror was also held last year — see here: Helvetic Coding Contest 2016 online mirror (teams, unrated)

The Helvetic Coding Contest is a yearly contest held at the EPFL in Lausanne by the PolyProg association. The contest itself took place on April the 1st, but the online mirror is scheduled on Sunday, 28th of May, 11:05 Moscow time. The duration is 4:30.

Rules:

• you can participate in teams or individually (1-3 people),

• standard ACM-ICPC rules (no hacking),

• the contest is not rated,

• if you have participated in the onsite contest, please do not participate in the mirror.

You will help us find the cow Heidi and participate in some April-Fools-Day confusion. The contest will feature 5 series of 3 related tasks with increasing difficulty (easy/medium/hard). Sometimes it may be the case that a solution for the hard version solves all of them, but usually not. We think that the problemset is diverse and interesting, and while the contest is ACM-style, you will find that some problems are not so standard. Most easy&medium problems are even solvable in Python, so you can also recommend this contest to your newbie friends :)

Acknowledgments: the problems were set by Christian Kauth, boba5551, meret, DamianS and myself. Thanks also go out to people who helped with the statements and testing: maksay, Michalina Pacholska (who also draws the cows), Benjamin Schubert, Aleksa Stanković, Ruofan Zhou; Tatiana_S for Russian translations and KAN for CodeForces coordination, as well as everyone involved in the actual onsite contest, who are too many to name here. We also thank the sponsors Open Systems and AdNovum. Lastly, thanks to MikeMirzayanov for CodeForces and Polygon (which was used to prepare the problems).

Finally, in a bit of autopromotion, note that you can use Hightail to automatically test your solutions :) Good luck!

After-contest UPDATE:

>>> Editorial <<<

Feel free to ask questions in this topic.

Thanks to everyone who participated! We hope you have enjoyed the problems. Congratulations to the winners:

1. ★SweeT DiscoverY★: dotorya, zigui, molamola. (solved all problems!)

2. japan-cookie: sigma425, sugim48, yosupo (solved all problems!)

3. HSE Bluebell: Um_nik, Kronecker

4. Veteran: I_love_Hoang_Yen, chemthan, ngfam_kongu

5. m(_ _)m: tmt514, Shik, dreamoon_love_AA

6. never red: xxTastyHypeBeast666xx, gongy, rnsiehemt

7. rng_58

8. (｀・ω・´): FizzyDavid, ohweonfire

The winners of the onsite contest (Petr Team) also solved all problems.

See you again next year!