This week in competitive programming

On Wednesday, Codeforces ran a normal round with an unusual title: Russian Code Cup 2014 Warmup (problems, results, top 5 on the left) with problems from the organizers of Russian Code Cup 2014, which we'll talk about below. I didn't take part, so I can only share a funny Swistakk's quote with you: "tourist had so much luck in this contest :P! Egor on 2nd place got TLE on E, because TL was very tight and flashmt on also 2nd place got TLE on A, because of endl's instead of \n and they will easily win if it weren't for those unlucky TLEs!" As the saying goes, fortune favours the bold!

Early on Saturday, the first qualification round of the Russian Code Cup 2014 took place (problems, results, top 5 on the left, my screencast). Russian Code Cup is a big competition with problems in Russian ran by Mail.Ru and ITMO. The round had quite a lot of technical issues, which was a pity since the problems themselves were nice.

Later on Saturday, Round 1B of the TopCoder Open took place (problems, results, top 5 on the left). The round saw many veterans at the top of the standings: krijgertje participated for the first time since TCO12, SnapDragon, meret and peter50216 participated for the first time since TCO13 - and they're all in top 7!

At the same time, people who have already qualified could try the same problems in Parallel Round 1B (top 5 on the left, my screencast). The problems had easy-to-understand statements but required some creativity to solve. Here's the medium difficulty one: you are given a 16x16 grid where some cells contain wolves, some cells contain sheep, and some are empty. You are allowed to build infinitely long vertical and horizontal walls along grid boundaries. What is the smallest number of walls needed to separate the sheep from the wolves?

Finally, on Sunday, the last round of this year's Open Cup took place (results, top 5 on the left). It had fewer participating teams than usual, but at the same time the teams from China showed impressive results, reminding that we shouldn't forget about them when making predictions for the ACM ICPC World Finals.

Here are the overall Open Cup standings. The top has a nice mix of veteran teams, like my team or the XZ team, current ACM ICPC competitors like SPb SU 4 and Moscow SU Tapirs, and the winning team tourist in a class of himself :)

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!