A snack week

CodeChef SnackDown 2019 onsite finals early on Saturday was the main event of the week (problems, results, top 5 on the left). Team ovuvuevuevue enyetuenwuevue ugbemugbem osas looked to have pretty good winning chances when they were the first to solve 8 problems with a couple of hours still left in the contest, but they could not make further progress in the remaining time. Team Dandelion solved the ninth problem with about five minutes remaining to go on top, but team pastry was working on the same problem and could still overtake them on penalty time. It turned out that they were comparing their solution locally against a slower but simpler one, and there were still cases of disagreement as the end of the contest was approaching. With nothing left to lose, they submitted whatever they had 30 seconds before the end of the round — and it passed the system test. Congratulations to team pastry on the super narrow victory!

Later that day, Codeforces hosted its Round 539 (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). The participants of the Codechef finals occupied most of the top spots in this round as well. wxhtxdy was the only contestant to solve all problems, but as his solution to E turned out to be incorrect, Um_nik emerged in the first place. Congratulations to Um_nik on the win!

Finally, the Open Cup 2018-19 Grand Prix of Belarus wrapped up the week (results, top 5 on the left). Team MIT THREE won the second round in a row, this time solving three in the last hour including two hardest ones in the last fifteen minutes. Amazing persistence once again, well done!

Problem A was a very nice interactive one: there's a hidden not necessarily convex polygon with n vertices (n<=200). Your goal is to find its area, but the only thing you can do is to pick a subset of its vertices by their numbers (the vertices are numbered in the order they appear along the polygon), and the system will tell you the area of the convex hull of the chosen points. You can retrieve the convex hull areas for at most n*(n-1)/2 subsets before you need to give back the area of the hidden polygon.

Thanks for reading, and check back next week!

I will also try to post something here and/or on Twitter about the first ever AtCoder World Tour finals in Tokyo on Thursday — already looking forward to the event!