Saratov State University in announcing Southern Subregional Programming Contest 2010. It will be held from the 19th to the 23rd of October.

For the right to reach the Regional Contest will be competing universities of Astrakhan, Volgograd, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Penza, Rostov, Samara, Saratov, Tambov, Ulyanovsk, Krasnodar and Stavropol regions and from the republics of Adygea, Mari El, Mordovia, North Ossetia, Tatarstan. Totally 63 teams will participate in the competition.

In addition, on 19th October will be held IX Regional Team Highschool Olympiad, which is a qualifying stage for the All-Russian Team Olympiad in Informatics for schoolchildren. The top five school teams will win the right to participate in the final stage of the Olympiad.

On the official website http://contest.sgu.ru/ you can view the results during the competition.

For the fifth consecutive year, except for official competition, teams are invited to an informal entertaining contest Code Game Challenge. Under Code Game Challenge teams will write programs that will be placed in the simulation game world, to directly compete with other participants! Teams will be given specifications for a game object. These specifications will include a set of interfaces to be implemented and a goal for the object to achieve when in competition with other team's objects. Capabilities include observation of the progress of other team's objects and measures that can be taken to block that progress. The winning team object will be determined in a game environment while competing with others.

On 23rd, October at 07:00 (UTC) on the site http://acm.sgu.ru/ will be held an online contest on the subregional contest tasks. The official onsite standings will be integrated to the online ranklist!

Good luck!
MikeMirzayanov

Good day!

Winter Computer School is announcing a series of team and individual programming contests for schoolchildren. This school is organized by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and sponsored by Yandex and ABBYY. The contests will be help on the Codeforces platform.

The series will consists of three team and the individual competitions. We invite schoolchildren (students enrolled at a school for secondary education) from the Russian Federation and other countries to take part.

The jury is already actively working on. All the competitions will include a wide range of problems and it will be useful and interesting for both beginners and experienced participants.

The winners will receive certificates and prizes!

The first contest is for teams and will be held on October 24 at 07:00 (UTC). The duration of the contest is 5 hours.

The full schedule (UTC times are given):

The first team contest	October, 24 (Sunday), 07:00	5 hours
The first individual contest	October, 30 (Saturday), 12:00	3 hours
The second team contest	November, 6 (Saturday), 11:00	5 hours
The third team contest	November, 13 (Saturday), 11:00	5 hours
The second individual contest	December, 5 (Sunday), 08:00	3 hours
The third individual contest	December, 12 (Sunday), 08:00	3 hours

To participate in contests (as in team and individual) you must have an individual account at Codeforces. Attention! Do not register accounts for the teams, because after a few days it will be announced a new features to organize teams from registered Codeforces users.

All ongoing competitions will be open for informal participation for students and other Codeforces users, who do not participate in the official standings.

We hope that these Olympics will help you tighten up your knowledge of programming and help to prepare for the upcoming Olympiads – All-Russian Team Olympiad, All-Russian Olympiad and other competitions.

To become a member please register on a series of competitions. Here is the complete list of registrants.

Register now!

P.S. I should add that the Codeforces project has prepared a special award for the best participant!

Good luck to all participants,
MikeMirzayanov and the Jury Team

UPD. An interface to create teams is available.

Pay attention that on the "Contests" page the October schedule is available. Key dates are:

I'm glad to announce two new features. Both improvements have repeatedly appeared in discussions on our pages.

What can be better than good news? Right you are - excellent news. The news I'm going to share with you is such.

We're glad to tell you, that VK company is now the primary sponsor of Codeforces project! It's a great honor for us - because VK is not only the largest social network in Russia and one of the largest in the world, it's also an example of a high-tech, innovative approach and dynamic development.

VK's help will allow us to continue the development of the platform, to run interesting contests for you on a regular basis. We have ambitious plans to fill Codeforces with useful educational content.

It's also important for us, that Codeforces programming contests community attracts not only its makers and participants.

"Codeforces contributes a lot into the development of collegiate programming in Russia. I'm glad that we have a chance to support this project. I hope it becomes even more interesting to participate in and win Codeforces contests", - says Pavel Durov.

"A powerful developers team is the main driving force of our company. It's at contests, like Codeforces, where we find young and talented programmers, who can solve difficult technical tasks", - added Andrey Rogozov, the head of VK development department.

Wish you high rating,
Mike Mirzayanov

I'm glad to announce new feature - comments preview. I know that many of you want to have possibility to edit comments, but ask you a patience. There is a time for everything, everything is good in its season.

I invite you to participate:) Round will be non-rated, but there will not be limited registration at this time! Please, read the rules before the contest!

You may read complete rules here.

The text contains only preliminary rules of Codeforces contests — something surely will change. In particular, I hope to help the community to find the illogic in the rules. However, I have already discussed the format with programming contests dinosaurs and made unrated alpha contests — it seems rules are OK.

I think than the format 5 tasks x 2 hour is quite good. For this reason, in the near future we will not change it, but of course, experiments are possible.

1. Before the competition all participants are divided into rooms, each room contains about 20 participants. For now random strategy works, but after a while it will be somehow correlated with the rating.

Hello!

Today will be the first alpha test of the new format of the competition. Registration will be limited - as soon as about 60 participants have register, I'll close it. Invited to participate, only those who have read rules draft. The document is in Russian, so I expect most participants from Russia. After some time we will translate the rules into English, and make this type of rounds really international.

In this round will be used folklore problems and the duration had to be reduced. For sure, it will be non-rated. Codeforces not guarantee that everything will work well - so be patient.

Many thanks to those who gathered to take part. I hope it will be interesting.

MikeMirzayanov

Guess when the contest began and ended :)

Hello.

This post contains few words and many pictures. I decided to publish statistics on Codeforces visitors for the past two months. Why? I believe that it might be interesting. I took pictures from Google Analitycs.

Codeforces was born little more than 4 months ago. During this time, we held 16 contests (though one of them was non-rated). There are more than 4000 registered users, and every day we get about 30 more. There are 1797 coders participated in the contests, many of them participate in our contests regularly. The average number of registrations for one competition is growing, and I want to believe that soon it will conquer psychological barrier 1000 users. Also codeforces social network is popular: more than 400 posts, almost 6000 comments. The leader of the hit parade of posts is this post, has collected to date 184 comments. Bravo, SkidanovAlex! And of course I say thank you to everyone who helped make the project: those who help in the development, who make the problems, translate texts and write the alternative solutions, participate in community life, and just take part in contests. Thank you!

Below you will find a few more pictures and statistics, the total traffic of about 250KB.

The first information letter

General information

From 2nd to 12th August 2010 Saratov State University runs an international student summer school in computer programming. Teams of three people and individual participants are invited to take part in it.

The school will take place in a picturesque place at one of Saratov resort centers on the Volga bank. The participants will be provided comfortable rooms for 2-4 people and meals three times a day. The resort center owns a beach and sport grounds.

The school curriculum includes lectures by Saratov state university coaches, joint trainings, problems tutorials and topical workshops. The curriculum is designed for younger university students who aspire to achieve high results at programming competitions.

The fees are 15000 RUR (~ 500 USD) for a person. Moreover, each team or an individual participant should bring a laptop with the support of WI-FI.

All interested participants and teams should register at http://acm.sgu.ru/sazanka-2010/ till 10th June 2010. Don't postpone the registration, as the number of participants we can take is limited.

You can get additional information by e-mail mirzayanovmr[symbol-at]gmail.com. As since the official language of the school is Russian, the registration requires knowledge of Russian. Also it is recommended to view this page in Russian.

There is known issue which sometimes leads to the fact that with the start of contest we have to restart the application (the same goes for the end of the contest). Please do not panic if it happens. In worst cases it will take 2-3 minutes. I’m resolving this issue, but at the moment it is not yet completely resolved. Thank you for your understanding.