An invitational week

TopCoder SRM 814 was the first round of last week (problems, results, top 5 on the left). ecnerwal was about 5 minutes faster than the rest of the field in solving the 1000-pointer, and therefore got enough margin to maintain the first place through the challenge phase and deny me qualification to Round 4 of TCO22 :) Well done!

Codeforces Round 745 followed later on the same day (problems, results, top 5 on the left, analysis). The last two problems were a lot harder than the rest, and only medium_waxberry and maroonrk were able to crack them. Congratulations to both!

ACM ICPC 2019-20 World Finals finally takes place tomorrow in Moscow. In case you haven't been following, quite a few teams could not make it and participated in a different online contest instead, and for those who could, the format was changed to 3 computers instead of 1. From the teams that made it to Moscow (list, but you have to exclude the online teams), the strongest three are the MIT, the Nizhny Novgorod SU and the Seoul NU. It seems that the battle tomorrow will be quite exciting!

I hope there will be an online mirror, and we'll solve it together with Gennady Korotkevich and Mikhail Tikhomirov for the fourth time in a row (2017, 2018, 2019), streaming the process online. We will use only 1 computer and stream to Gennady's Twitch channel this time. Tune in tomorrow around 9:15am Moscow time and ask your questions in chat! There is also an amazing official stream with commentary.