This week in competitive programming

Codeforces Round 272 was the only regular contest during the last week (problems, results, top 5 on the left). The problemset consisted of two relatively simple mathematical problems A and B solved with formulas that can be figured out using pen and paper, two dynamic programming problems C and D that had a few tricky implementation details to take care of, and an extremely tedious O(nlogn) data structure problem E that did not require anything more complicated than a stack and binary search, but needed more than an hour to implement and had a lot of possible plus/minus one errors to make.

There was another online contest held on Saturday, Marathon24, which is very similar in format to Challenge24: mostly solving optimization problems instead of pure algorithmic ones, the online part takes 5 hours but people who advance will participate in a 24-hour onsite competition. I didn't participate, but some quite strong teams did; I'm not sure if the final results are available online since the standings mention that they are still frozen. Maybe somebody reading this blog can confirm if the final results are already available?

Thanks for reading, and check back next week!