A hammer week

TopCoder has hosted two SRMs during the June 26 - July 2 week. First off, SRM 716 took place on Tuesday (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). ACRush came back to the SRMs after more than a year, presumably to practice for the upcoming TCO rounds. He scored more points than anybody else from problem solving - but it was only good enough for the third place, as dotory1158 and especially K.A.D.R shined in the challenge phase. Well done!

Later on the same day, Codeforces held its Round 421 (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). There was a certain amount of unfortunate controversy with regard to problem A, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt - nevertheless, TakanashiRikka was the best on the remaining four problems and got the first place. Congratulations!

The second TopCoder round of the week, SRM 717, happened on Friday (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis, my screencast). I had my solution for the medium problem fail, but even without that setback I would finish behind Deretin - great job on the convincing win!

Here's what that problem was about. You are given two numbers n (up to 10⁹) and m (up to 10⁵). For each i between 1 and m, you need to find the number of permutations of n+i objects such that the first i objects are not left untouched by the permutation. As an example, when n=0 we're counting derangements of each size between 1 and m.

My solution for this problem involved Fast Fourier Transformation because, well, I had a hammer, and the problem was not dissimilar enough to a nail :) And it failed because I've reused FFT code from my library, which I've optimized heavily to squeeze under the time limit in a previous Open Cup round, and to which I've introduced a small bug during that optimization :(

And on the weekend, two-person teams competed for the fame and monetary prizes at the onsite finals of CodeChef Snackdown 2017 (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). The last year's winner "Messages compress" were in the lead for long periods of time, but in the last hour they tried to get three problems accepted but got zero, which gave other teams a chance. Team Dandelion have seized that chance and won solving 9 problems out of 10. Way to go!

Thanks for reading, and check back for the next week's summary.