This week in competitive programming

TopCoder SRM 648 has started the last week's contests as early as Monday (problems, results, top 5 on the left, my screencast). The hard problem, while innocent on the surface, turned out to be exceptionally tricky, requiring some serious combinatorics and dynamic programming mastery - check it out! The statement is as simple as: how many simple undirected graphs are there with N labeled vertices and K bridges? N is up to 50.

Codeforces Round 290 took place just several hours later (problems, results, top 5 on the left, my screencast). Problem D was another cute combinatorics exercise. Its most interesting part boiled down to: given a tree, how many ways are there to remove its leaves one by one until we remove everything? Of course, new leaves may appear after removing some. Had the tree been rooted, this would be a pretty standard dynamic programming application, but how to deal with the fact that there's no root?

Finally, Rockethon 2015 gave everybody a shot at prizes on Saturday (problems, results, top 5 on the left). Gennady has carefully progressed through all problems, not really leaving anybody else a chance - congratulations!

There were also several Open Cup rounds in the past weeks, and the Petrozavodsk training camp has assembled an unprecedented number of ACM ICPC teams - but as the same problems are still going to be used for other training camps, I will postpone discussing those for now. Stay tuned for some really tough problems in the coming weeks!