Invitation to CodeChef September Mega Cook-Off 2018!

Hello CodeChef Community!
We are excited to invite you to the September Mega Cook-Off 2018 sponsored by ShareChat. This time there are additional incentives to participate in the contest. Top 50 Indian students in the Cook-Off who are participating in the ACM-ICPC 2018 will be eligible for ACM ICPC travel reimbursement.
Not just this! There are more reasons to be excited as ShareChat, our sponsor of September Mega Cook-Off is offering full-time job opportunities for programmers across the globe. More details can be found on the September Cook-Off contest page.

Joining me this time on the problem setting panel are:

  • Problem Setter: jafarbadour (Jafar A Badour), dolabmoon (Max Hsia)

  • Problem Tester: spiral_out (Hussain Kara Fallah)

  • Problem Editorialist: taran_1407 (taran_1407)

  • Statement Verifier: xellos0 (Jakub Safin)

  • Russian Translator: gomelfk (Fedor Korobeinikov)

  • Mandarin Translator: huzecong (Hu Zecong)

  • Vietnamese Translator: (VNOI Team)

  • Hindi Translator: srijand (Srijan Dubey)

  • Bengali Translator:solaimanope (Mohammad Solaiman)

Contest Details:

Time: 23rd September 2018 (2130 hrs) to 24th September 2018 (0000 hrs). (Indian Standard Time — +5:30 GMT) — Check your timezone.

Contest link: https://www.codechef.com/COOK98

Registration: You just need to have a CodeChef handle to participate. For all those, who are interested and do not have a CodeChef handle, are requested to register in order to participate.

Prizes:
Top 10 performers in Global and Indian category will get CodeChef laddus, with which the winners can claim cool CodeChef goodies. Know more here: https://discuss.codechef.com/questions/51999/how-do-i-win-a-codechef-goodie. (For those who have not yet got their previous winning, please send an email to [email protected])

Good Luck!
Hope to see you participating!
Happy Programming!

1 Like

Announcement about top 50 Indians for ACM ICPC?

The problem OTEW from "#### MEGA CookOff " had a large number of weak test cases . As I was going through the AC’ed solutions I found many solutions failing in either of the two test cases.

[2
5
2 1 2 1 2
5
2 2 1 2 2][2]

The solutions which fail in most of the cases …
Soln 1 , Soln 2, Soln 3, Soln 4, Soln 5, Soln 6, Soln 7, Soln 7, Soln 8, Soln 9, Soln 10.
As it can be clearly seen that many solutions fail on this very small test case (You can’t even call this test case a corner case …XD ) .
So @admin amd @kingofnumbers please look over it … This may result in a huge drop in ratings for many user as it is really painful to get a TLE in a ongoing contest and see such solutions, pass after the contest… :frowning:

8 Likes

Is it rated ??

Yes its rated like all cookoffs so it should me made unrated or else it will be unfair to all users

I am requesting @admin to look into this matter,many people such as me sitting 2hrs for logic with 1 case like this and then see people pass it easily xD!
Many people get Ac and get better rank,what will be the solution of this?
some of top 50 indians get Ac with wrong soln. what will be the soln of reimbursement for this kind of matter??

2 Likes

yeah @admin plz look into this matter

same thing happened to me I spent two hours for covering each and every test case and lastly wasn’t able to submit my soln

@admin that’s not fair. I scratched my head for whole contest on problem OTEW, still couldn’t come up with a solution , and there are these wrong solution getting ACed .

2 Likes

thank god this means that I was not the only one struggling to get past this problem XD. Also if you could update the ratings and provide us with the solution it will be helpful. I was thinking of count of sum of distinct subarrays for this problem was that a correct approach?

Even I thought that test cases are weak but after very long time after contest… I was waiting for editorial to raise this issue…
I think this question should be removed from cook off… Cuz it won’t be fair to rejudge solutions… and even if we make it unrated then what about travel reimbursement ?
So according to my opinion just remove the question…

Cuz there will be many people who got it accepted and then they wasted time in other questions instead of thinking about correct solution for 2nd one as it is already accepted… (including me)
So rejudge won’t be fair…

One more point to raise is python library passes last question of div1 in few lines… how’s it fair to keep such question in contest in the first place…

Few lines==3 lines…

Grossly unfair. Even I spent the whole contest time for ONETWO. Along with that, solutions with 3-4 lines of code in Python using Numpy got accepted for DOTIT. What would you do about it?

And what about the people who spent time to come up with a correct solution because they were getting wrong answer when they tried this testcase while debugging? For it to be fair, it should be unrated. And I don’t understand why it needs to rated for travel reimbusement.

You mean they could have solved 3rd one if 2nd one was not there ?
Could be the case…
I don’t want it to be rated… But if they want to give travel reimbursement then i feel that removing it would be more fair…
Also I partially agree with you…
Some people could solved 3rd one instead…
But I also feel 3rd one was already open for them to solve…

What’s ur opinion then ? What’s a better solution ?

Tbh, they should move the travel reimbursement thing also to October. Give to top 75 in October Cook Off. 3rd one was open to solve. But why will someone solve 3rd one if they know they can solve 2nd one, given some time?

Vijju tried last one after solving 2nd one…
Some people can switch…
Yes shifting it(travel reimbursement) to next cook off will also be fair… let’s see what admins do…

Making this contest rated is extremely stupid. Here’s what happened to me:
Codechef gives 500 error for the first 2 minutes. Then the problems names (dashboard) load but the problems don’t. Some of them load after 1-2 minutes. I don’t refresh the ones that didn’t load, which was a huge mistake as Codechef believes in not sorting the problems in the order of difficulty. Finally, I decided to try some other problem and refresh the others. I solve the 1st problem.
I try the second problem. I submit a solution, but forget to put a break, so it TLEs. I notice that it will TLE and try to resubmit. I manage to submit it after refreshing the submit page a few times. Then I wait. The submit page doesn’t tell me what happened to my submission, and the status page doesn’t load. I come to know that I got WA after 5 minutes. I tried for 15-20 more minutes and then got 405 error on submit page for 3-4 minutes. After that, thinking that it will be unrated anyway, I slowed down (that’s my mistake, I know).

And to know that there were so many submissions that passed because of wrong testcases. I can’t believe that. I have no idea how you can still make it rated. Hey, but then it’s Codechef. That must be it.

7 Likes