A calm week before the storm

This week was very calm compared to recent ones, with just one competition: TopCoder SRM 659 in the middle of the night on Wednesday (problems, results, top 5 on the left). Three "target" coders participated in the match: UdH-WiNGeR held the first place after the coding phase with the fastest solution for the 500-pointer, but his solution for the 250-pointer failed; Endagorion was almost as fast, but that was only enough for the second place because RAVEman found three successful challenges to squeeze out the victory. Congratulations Anton!

Many top-level competitors are now in Morocco to participate in, judge, analyze, broadcast, or just watch the ACM ICPC World Finals. The participating teams, ordered by the rating of the highest member, can be found on Codeforces, and there will be live broadcast of the competition on Wednesday on ICPC Live. The trend in the programming competition world is exploring different formats and new types of problems lately, while ACM ICPC did not change much in the past years. Are we going to see some new types of problems (interactive problems, random-input problems, or maybe something completely new) this time?

In the next three days, I will also try to share some ICPC news and information that is not covered via the official channels, so stay tuned!