As you all know there have been glitches in this month’s contest problem. Needless to say they were glaring and should not recur. We are sorry.

Life has come a full circle for us in the last couple of weeks. The other day we were basking in the glory of completing one eventful year and being so privileged to get all your patronage. We were bragging about our achievements! And now we have to face this to bring us back to our feet.

But we see a silver lining in this too. We have been inundated with lot of emails and feedback showing us how much you care. As we have been telling you time and again, we value each and every comment of yours and will certainly try to improve from here on. The kinks have been identified and we will now work with renewed vigor to get it all in place.

The “Traffic Jam problem” has been fixed and the scorecard has been updated. Please let us know in case there are still any discrepancies. We are extending the contest by a couple of more days. The contest now ends on 13th of March, 3 PM IST. We know that there is no substitute for the time spent by all of you on the problem. But this is the least we could do to try and be fair to all.

And do we need to say that we will need your continued support in our endeavor to make Codechef the way you want to see it? It will take us some time to get there. Please bear with us and be with us.

Keep sending your comments and let us know what you think and how can we improve further. Point out our mistakes but please do not hate us.

Anup

This month, as part of our anniversary special, we are picking the best of our past POTMs and are giving him the title of Programmer of the Year 09-10!

Not only has Stephen Merriman performed consistently well in our monthly challenges, but he has also been a generous contributor to our site. We’d like to show our appreciation for all the tutorials, feedback and the consistent help he provides on our forums. Thanks Stephen!

Here’s more from the Programmer of the Year himself:

Name: Stephen Merriman
Age: 23
Institute: none, though I can throw in a shameless plug for my work: http://www.cre8d-design.com
Userid: TripleM

Brief introduction about yourself (under 140 characters): Having not discovered programming contests until university, I now love them, and was very excited when I found a new one in CodeChef.

How/When did you start programming?
It’s quite hard to remember, actually. I remember making games in BASIC on an old Acorn Archimedes when I was very young, and then when my sister took some computing papers at university I would watch/read her textbooks. So maybe somewhere from 7 to 10? After competing in the IMO throughout high school, I never discovered programming contests until part way through university where I competed in the ICPC and found Topcoder among others.

What do you do when you’re not programming?
What do you mean not programming? Oh yeah, I do find time to play soccer during the summer, and attend a weekly pub quiz (sadly, there aren’t enough questions about programming for me to be any good).

What do you like most about CodeChef?
The contests, of course; I love entering any contest I can find online. Plus the fact that all those crazy targets at TopCoder don’t compete, so I actually have a chance of winning

How many hours a day do you program?
Seeing as my job involves programming all day, let alone the time I spend solving problems on SPOJ, CodeChef or competitions like the Codejam, it’s probably too large for me to want to think about!

What’s your favourite book and why?
This is going to sound a bit repetitive after Anshuman and Varun, but make that three in a row for Harry Potter; maybe there’s a connection between programming and magic? I’ve always found novels about magic enjoyable. Plus, I have read all 80 something Agatha Christie murder mysteries (the link is more obvious there, problem solving <-> whodunit).

If you could eat dinner with any famous person (past or present), who would it be and what dish would you have?
Boy, that’s a tough one.. the dish would be roast chicken just because it’s my favourite meal. I’d have to think more about this but for now let’s say Fermat, just to see if he really did have a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

What are your plans for the future?
Currently I’m perfectly happy with my job. I get to work from home for my sister, sleep in a bit, and make websites all day. I can’t see this changing any time in the forseeable future, but we’ll see how things go. Other than that - more top 5 codechef finishes, and getting as far as I can through the TCO + Codejam later this year.

With over sixty active CodeChef Campus Chapters in the country, two exciting meetups under its belt, a multi city geek symposium in its first year of existence, an excellent practice problem section, and an active wiki, blog and forums, CodeChef has accomplished a lot in its first year.

Let’s take a look at some interesting facts, figures and milestones that make CodeChef what it is:

• CodeChef has a user base of over 20,000 people globally.
• Our website receives over to 50,000 visits every month.
• Participants are students from 2000 different institutes, IITs, IIITs, BITS, NITs, DCE/DTU, JNTU and professionals from over 1000 different organizations such as  TCS, IBM, Oracle,  Google, Adobe, L&T Infotech, Thoughtworks.
• Prizes worth up to Rs.1,50,000 are given out to Indian and global winners every month.
• Over Rs.18 lakhs in prize money has been given out by since the first CodeChef Challenge in March 2009.
• CodeChef has established campus chapters in over 50 prominent colleges in the country including the likes of IIT-K, BITS Pilani, BIT Mesra, DA-IICT etc.
• The first Meetup was conducted in Mumbai on 18th July 2009. CodeChef’s second Meetup took place at Delhi College of Engineering/Delhi Technological University on 31st October 2009.
• The CodeChef Techtalks, an event that featured international speakers; in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore took place on the 10th, 11th and 12th of September 2009.
• CodeChef’s Programmer of the Month puts the spotlight on some extremely talented programmers. They have ranged from 17 yrs old Keshav Dhandhania to 33 yrs old Josh Metzler.
• The CodeChef newsletter goes out to 12000 readers every month.
• CodeChef held the Campus SnackDown in January 2010. 639 teams participated and the top 7 teams were flown down to Mumbai for an In-person round.
• CodeChef has over 2150 fans on the FaceBook Fanpage and over 1286 followers on Twitter.
• Hundreds and hundreds of photos make up the CodeChef Flicker stream.
• Through Vimeo, CodeChef has uploaded a bunch of videos to its blogs and even a video tutorial to its wiki!

Come back in a few days to see our exciting addition to this blog.

Also, make sure you keep a watch out for our Anniversary Facebook Contest and our Programmer of the Year!

This is to let you know that we are not only cognizant of your feedback, we value it a lot and are working on it. It is heartening for us to get feedback and we really appreciate the time and effort spent by all of you. We are in the process of revamping a few areas based on your feedback and hope that it will help us to provide you with a better experience.

First of all, we want to sincerely apologize for some glaring issues with the problem statements this time round. We are in the process of making changes to our problem setting structure and in the coming few months we hope that most of the issues related to the problems will be sorted out. Also, going forward, we will try to include all the test cases in a single file so that time limits are not an issue.

As for the shorter format of the contest, there clearly seems to be a demand but whether at the expense of the longer format or not we are still unsure. As mentioned by a few of you, we still feel that there is a clear need of the longer format. We shall be working towards finding a solution to this and it may take us a little longer than the next contest to arrive at the implementation but till then please bear with us.

We thank you for all your feedback and as we have been telling you, it is very important to us and we’d like all of you to keep sending us the same at feedback@codechef.com or keep commenting here. It will be our endeavour to work towards it.

Regards,
The Codechef Team.

CodeChef will be under scheduled maintenance today from 1930 hours (11th Feb ‘10) to 2130 hours (11th Feb ‘10) IST (Indian Standard Time)

We will let you all know once the site is up again.

We regret the inconvenience and will be back ASAP!

The website is now up and running. If you face any issues, please send a mail at feedback@codechef.com.

Cheers!

Our February challenge has finally ended and here are the winners!

India:

1. Tasnim Khan - Rs. 10000
2. Yash - Rs. 7000
3. Kunal Jain - Rs. 5000
4. Gaurav Agarwal - Rs. 4000
5. Imran - Rs. 3000
5. Surendra - Rs. 3000
7. Harish Narware - Rs. 2500
8. Abhijith Reddy - Rs. 2500
9. Rishikesh Dwivedi - Rs. 2500
10. Anil Kishore - Rs. 2500
11. Praveen SP - Rs. 1500
12. Shubham Mathur - Rs. 1500
12. Anshuman Singh - Rs. 1500
14. Pankaj - Rs. 1500
15. Uday Jalan - Rs. 1500
16. Deepak Pandey - Rs. 1000
17. Chitradeep Dutta Roy - Rs. 1000
18. Piyush Sachdeva - Rs. 1000
19. Balajiganapathi - Rs. 1000
20. Nadeem Moidu - Rs. 1000

Global:
1. Mark Greve - $440
2. Tomasz Czajka - $275
3. David Stolp - $220
4. Josh Metzler - $110
5. Stephen Merriman - $55

Fun Facts for this contest:

• This contest has had the highest number of unique participants to date!
• Nine of the top ten Indian scorers are either from IIIT, Allahabad or IIIT, Hyderabad while 8th place holder Abhijith Reddy is from BITS Pilani Goa.
• Mark Greve, February’s Programmer of the Month also ranked 1st in the February challenge. Congratulations!

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all the winners of this month’s challenge and thank you all for participating.

As always, we would love to hear your suggestions and feedback to help make this site better. If there’s anything you would like us to know, do drop in an email at feedback@codechef.com .

Cheers,
Basil

Name : Mark Greve

Age : 25

Institute : Aarhus University

User ID : gmark

Twitter ID : markgreve

How/When did you start programming?

I started programming in BASIC around the age of 10 and switched to C++ when I
was 12. I never really wrote anything serious until I began university, and my
programming career first really took off when I started doing programming
contests.

What do you do when you’re not programming?

When I’m not spending time in front of my computer, I enjoy doing various
sports such as soccer and table tennis. I also like to go spearfishing when the
weather permits.

What do you like most about CodeChef?

The problems, of course! The problems in the monthly contests are of a really
high quality, and it’s a real pleasure working on them. Other than that I think
the CodeChef platform is quite nice. It’s cool to be able to check up on what’s
going on by looking at the blog or checking the tweets.

How many hours a day do you program?

That varies quite a lot. On average I’d say around 3 hours per day.

What’s your favourite book and why?

I have hardly read any books in recent years. However I did really enjoy
reading the trilogy in five parts about the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I’m remember being very impressed by all the extraordinarily creative and
intelligent comedic dialogue in these books.

If you could eat dinner with any famous person (past or present), who would it be and what dish would you have?

That’s too hard to answer.

What are your plans for the future.

Once I’m done with my PhD studies, I will probably go for an industry job.
Other than that I am still enjoying doing programming contests just as much as
when I started back in 2007, so I probably won’t leave competing anytime soon.

At Directi, I along with many of my tech-inclined colleagues, have been volunteering significant personal time and energy towards constantly enhancing the programming talent across the country through several social and community initiatives across the last few years. Codechef has been our flagship non-profit initiative in this regards. We have since held seminars, provided coaching, conducted campus engagement activities and much more.

Sponsoring the ACM ICPC world finalists is another such initiative on our part, to assist our champions in putting India on the map within the coding circuit. We at Directi have personally interacted with all the members in these teams - all brilliant individuals - and we are proud to have sponsored them for the ACM ICPC world finals.

I invite you all to join us in wishing them luck as they compete with 103 other teams around the globe for fame and glory!

Use the widgets on the right to send them your wishes via facebook and twitter

Cheers!
Bhavin Turakhia, CEO, Directi.

THE TEAMS

THE KINGS GAMBIT

TheKingsGambit (TKG), name derived from a famous opening move in Chess, was formed in 2008 and went to represent India in the World finals 2009. Presently, TKG expands to the names Anshuman, Gaurav and Rajat. The strength of the team lies in the diversity of skill set, the positive attitute and co-ordination. The final year computer science trio believes ‘work hard, party harder’.

Let’s hear it from the team itself - TheKingsGambit: “All our engines work on the fuel supply of coffee/tea :P. Most of our free time is spent watching movies, TV shows or playing games (sometimes outdoors). Some not so common facts about us are that we all studied in the same city and have met before beginning college. One of us has almost drowned in three water bodies while another one of us has driven a real war tank. One of us has acted in a movie and people definitely don’t know which one of the above has been made up.

We have done well as a team previously and hope to register a good performance at the World Finals this year.”

COUNTER GAMBIT

CounterGambit, are a rare blend of analytical problem solving, algorithmic skill and programming prowess intended to throw some fierce competition at TheKingsGambit, and has found its way to the ICPC World Finals. The crew consists of Venkatesh, Abhilash and Akhil.

Venkatesh is an algorithm contest veteran with a great deal of experience since high school, including the IOI 2007 and the ICPC World Finals 2008. His mathematical and analytical skills form a crucial part of the way the team functions. Akhil is a seasoned programmer, and brings lightning fast implementation into the equation, especially with dynamic programming, graphs and searching. Abhilash comes from an application development background, and has his way with the language, and works data structures to do his bidding.

All three, evidently, possess brilliant analytical skills, love to solve problems, and love to compete.

How can you wish the teams?

Leave a comment on FaceBook or Tweet luck to the teams!

When you tweet remember to include the hashtag #acmicpc2010

In an attempt to motivate and encourage more people to participate and showcase their skills in our monthly contests, based on the feedback from several CodeChef winners, we have decided to reward more number of participants starting this February. To start with, we are doing this only for Indian participants.

So, we’re glad to inform you that we will now be rewarding the top 20 participants in India! The prize structure will be as follows:

Position	Prize
1st	Rs. 10,000
2nd	Rs. 7,000
3rd	Rs. 5,000
4th	Rs. 4,000
5th	Rs. 3,500
6th-10th	Rs. 2,500 each
11th-15th	Rs. 1,500 each
16th-20th	Rs. 1,000 each

Note: All prizes above Rs.5000 will be taxed at 30%. TDS certificates will be issued at the end of the financial year.

At CodeChef we’re always looking to improve, and for this very reason we give a lot of importance to the feedback we receive. Please feel free to suggest any changes or voice any concerns that you may have.

We’re very excited about the new prize structure and hope that you all are as well.

Cheers,
Team Codechef

CodeChef will be under scheduled maintenance today from 2300 hours (19th Jan ‘10) to 0200 hours (20th Jan ‘10) IST

Will let you all know when the site is up again.

We regret the inconvenience but we need to do this

Cheers!