Russian Code Cup 2012 Programming Championship: how it was
Last Monday, the second in a row five-month marathon Russian Code Cup 2012 was completed . The first place was taken by Vladislav Yepifanov from Nizhny Novgorod, retaining the first position from the qualifying and qualifying rounds, the second place was taken by Natalya Bondarenko , associate professor at Saratov State University - one of the leaders in training the highest-class programmers. This year, the third place was taken by Yegor Kulikov. Congratulations to the winners!
The gifts were handed out, the prizes were awarded, the diplomas were signed, and now is the time to tell how it was.
')
UPDATE:
A small reporting video c Russian Code Cup 2012.
There is a testing system created and maintained by our co-organizers - NRU ITMO . It works as a service - it receives a program at the entrance, compiles it, runs it, skips a series of tests on it and, if all the tests pass, marks the solution to the problem and fixes the time and the author of this solution. Its stability was ensured by ITMO specialists and the experience of previous competitions showed its perfect performance. Well, this is not surprising: the system was written by world champions in programming. The system is used, of course, not only in the Russian Code Cup .
The RussianCodeCup.ru site itself, among other things, is an interface for working with this system. Since the qualifications and semi-finals were held online, the main task then was to keep the site in working condition. For the final, the site was moved to the cloud, and for the finalists a separate site was opened, closed to the external network. This allowed to raise the level of reliability of the information system and close a number of technical risks.
The event was held at the Swissotel conference center in Moscow, and the participants and the jury resided in the hotel itself.
We deliberately position the Russian Code Cup 2012 as a primacy among Russian-speaking programmers, in contrast to a number of other international tournaments where English is the main one, but there are no restrictions on geography.
The day before the tournament, the Mail.Ru Group specialists and managers talked about the technical problems being solved in the company. The topics of the reports were relevant to the knowledge and experience of the students - this included machine learning from the head of the ranking department Alexey Voropayev and analyst Mail.Ru Group Eduard Tyantov , and features of building game objects from the technical director and head of the game mechanics Allods Online team Ilya Vaisman . Konstantin Osipov, Tarantool Development Manager, and Alexander Gorny, CIO Mail.Ru Group, spoke about their experience. The Mail.Ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin opened the Russian Code Cup for the finalists.
The Russian Code Cup 2012 was accompanied by video broadcasting - it could be viewed both on the tournament website and on the links from the main Mail.Ru page.
The live broadcast of programming tournaments is a rather unusual format for the Internet. For the “uninitiated,” what the guys are doing in the closed hall of the convention center is a dark forest. Organizing a live broadcast, while maintaining entertainment and information for the widest audience - not an easy task. After all, the current ranking table is always available on the website in a separate section, and a typical picture from the hall where the tournament is held is the concentrated faces of the participants, illuminated by laptop screens.
Therefore, we had interviews, discussions, round tables - with the jury, with invited guests, as well as the inclusion of a rating table with comments of experts on the air.
We are faced with a video delay problem on the air (from several seconds to a minute). For the interview this does not create any problems, but for the rating table this is important - the data in it must be relevant at the time of its demonstration. The ideal solution to this problem is practically non-existent, primarily due to the peculiarities of the broadcast technology itself on the network, but this delay can be markedly reduced in various ways.
The second problem was the use of infographics in the video stream. Most users do not expand the video broadcast to full screen, and to achieve satisfactory readability of the text (surnames, points, nicknames) in a relatively low resolution and with the characteristic compression of the video while maintaining the usual look of the table was not easy. We coped with this by simplifying the design and breaking the table into slides.
To solve this problem, the video client-side technology would be much more suitable, when at the right moment a quality photo or vector image is included in the stream at the right moment, and as a result, the user receives an image of a table or scheme that does not contain artifacts typical for video codecs. We haven’t found any suitable solutions for such a task, I will be glad to any advice and suggestions.
At the end of the broadcast: videos and photos from the event can already be viewed on the site Russian Code Cup 2012 .
The second potentially narrow point could be the Internet on the site. After all, if the network turns off, the tournament will have to be suspended, or even terminated. In order to be calm about this, a three-level backup system was built, including switching the cable Internet to Wi-Fi, and in case of a failure, also to 4G. Two hours before the final, miracles really began to happen to the Internet, and we already began to slowly include a reserve, but everything worked out, and by the time the tournament began, the Internet had fully recovered.
The necessary office equipment was reserved, a quick scaling of registration was performed if necessary. Fortunately, none of the risks involved have worked and everything went smoothly.
While the guests were gathering, the studio actively discussed current issues in the field of IT.
At the "round table" devoted to the issues of sports programming, they discussed the idea of ​​creating an all-Russian federation of sports programming. After all, there are all-Russian sports federations of go, ice stock, darts, city sports, orienteering or softball. Interestingly, the list of duties of any sports federation includes the requirement “to participate in the prevention of doping in sport and in the fight against it, as well as in counteracting the manifestations of any forms of discrimination and violence in sport”. We very much hope that the problem of doping will not be a threat to sports programming in the coming years.
The Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolay Nikiforov, the rectors Vladimir Vasilyev (NRU ITMO) and Anatoly Alexandrov (Moscow State Technical University na Bauman) were invited to the panel discussion. Together with the CEO of Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Grishin, the guests during the discussion raised issues of the quality of IT education in Russia. So it was possible to hear the point of view on the problems of training IT staff on all three sides - the state, education and business. This discussion can be viewed in its entirety on the official site of RussianCodeCup.ru
For the guests of the Russian Code Cup, we organized several IT-entertainment. For example, here are such sphere-races - you need to hold an iPhone / iPad controlled Orbotix Sphero ball around the track and come to the finish line first.
The ball itself is connected with a tablet or phone via Bluetooth. By command from a mobile device, you can arbitrarily change the direction of movement. Evil tongues say that the flywheel spun by batteries is to blame for everything, but we know that in fact there is a little hamster with electrodes inside it.
Among other interactive entertainment - for example, a video wall, adding witty statements on IT topics "in bubbles" over a live picture from the room. adds a clever idea to everyone passing by, or a similar video wall on which a simple drawing could be drawn with hand movements.
And at the end of the day, on the yacht, before the entertainment program, everyone could learn a lot about the development for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotic kit - a gift from the Mail.Ru Group to all the finalists of the Russian Code Cup. They showed and told the coach of the teams on the motivational robotics of the international level Vladimir Efgrafov and the winner of the international robotic competitions Anatoly Vozhdayev. Together with this designer, the guys also received a book by John Hansen "LEGO Mindstorms NXT Power Programming: Robotics in C". Who knows, maybe we will see one of them also at Eurobot? ..
The first place in the Russian Code Cup 2012 was taken by Vladislav Epifanov . It is worth noting that he consistently and confidently occupied the first places in the qualifying round and in the qualifying. In the final, he was the only one to solve five problems. For him, the Russian Code Cup 2012 is the first serious victory, but not the first serious experience: Vladislav is twice the finalist of Google Code Jam, and last year he finished fifth in the Russian Code Cup 2011. In the world TopCoder rating, Vladislav is ranked sixteenth. In addition to the absolute victory in the Russian Code Cup 2012, we also noted him as the first of all finalists who solved problems C and F. Problem F was rather difficult, only five people coped with it. Vladislav received the first prize - 10,000 US dollars.
This year, the second place was taken by Natalya Bondarenko . We have only two girls in the final, and getting into the top three of one of them was a surprise for everyone. Congratulations once again to Natalya, she is great! Shortly before the end of the tournament, a round table was held on sports programming, where Mikhail Mirzayanov talked about Natasha:
The third place was taken by Egor Kulikov . Egor was one of the favorites of the RCC, passed to the finals of five Google Code Jam, and in one of them, two years ago, took first place.
It is worth noting Eugene Kapun - two-time world champion ACM-ICPC (as part of a team from NRU ITMO). Eugene managed to solve only one of all the finalists one of the most difficult tasks of the tournament - task E.
Probably next year we will not only hold the Russian Code Cup 2013 in a new location (in the new office of Mail.Ru Group ), but also in a slightly changed format. It is likely that a “marathon” test will be added, with “long”, more practical tasks around web technologies, algorithms, and maybe even elements of system programming. Perhaps we will make the tasks themselves the subject of a separate competition, and we will make the participation in such a competition as a team competition. Take something better with Challenge24 . Add a game round - like the ACM-ICPC Challenge . What do you think?
Thank.
Thank you for participating, for participating in the participation. The next post about the Russian Code Cup will be longer and more difficult - we will sort out all the tasks from the tournament in great detail.
Team Russian Code Cup
PS A small announcement. Exactly one month later, on October 17th, we start the second Technology Forum 2012 this year. Registration is open, participation is free, but the number of places is limited. In addition to Mail.Ru specialists, Western speakers from Opera, AJAX.org and other companies are in the program. Stories about past Forums - autumn and spring .
The gifts were handed out, the prizes were awarded, the diplomas were signed, and now is the time to tell how it was.
')
UPDATE:
A small reporting video c Russian Code Cup 2012.
- Facts and Figures
- How was the tournament?
- Broadcast, technology, Internet and other organizational issues
- Substantial part: round tables and panel discussion
- Interactive on-site entertainment and cultural program
- The strongest programmers and their trophies
- Plans for 2013
Facts and Figures
- More than 3,000 Russian-speaking programmers from around the world participated in the Russian Code Cup 2012 . This year, the Russians had a majority at the championship - 65%, and the rest was in Ukraine (15%), Belarus (9%), the countries of the former USSR, Europe and the USA. Last year, exactly half of the participants were from Russia, and there were more Ukrainians and Belarusians (20% and 14%, respectively). Russia confidently holds the first place in the world in terms of the number of victories - over the past 13 years, our universities at the ACM ICPC World Championship ranked first seven times, both Facebook Hacker Cup were taken by Russian programmers, and in our Russian Code Cup both in this and in the past year, the first three places are shared by graduates of domestic universities.
- In 2012, 25 finalists from last year participate - exactly half. The fact that half of the strongest are “fresh faces” cannot but rejoice. The principle of selection to the finals from thousands of participants is completely devoid of the human factor - we until the last moment waited for surprises in the composition of the finalists.
- In the finals we managed to collect the best of the best, not only according to our own criteria. So, the best Russian-speaking programmers got into the finish line of the Russian Code Cup 2012 without any wildcards, either by TopCoder rating or Codeforces rating . Of the ten first Russian-speaking programmers in the TopCoder rating, all ten are participants of the Russian Code Cup 2012, and, moreover, all went to the finals (except for Gennady Korotkevich - he was under 18 years old, and we have an age limit from below). Of the 30 Codeforces leaders, just over half are Russian-speaking programmers, and almost all of them qualified for the Russian Code Cup 2012 final.
These facts simultaneously emphasize both the correctness of the TopCoder and Codeforces ratings (which, in general, no one doubts), and the fairness of the still-young Russian Code Cup rating.
And now about the tournament itself
There is a testing system created and maintained by our co-organizers - NRU ITMO . It works as a service - it receives a program at the entrance, compiles it, runs it, skips a series of tests on it and, if all the tests pass, marks the solution to the problem and fixes the time and the author of this solution. Its stability was ensured by ITMO specialists and the experience of previous competitions showed its perfect performance. Well, this is not surprising: the system was written by world champions in programming. The system is used, of course, not only in the Russian Code Cup .
The RussianCodeCup.ru site itself, among other things, is an interface for working with this system. Since the qualifications and semi-finals were held online, the main task then was to keep the site in working condition. For the final, the site was moved to the cloud, and for the finalists a separate site was opened, closed to the external network. This allowed to raise the level of reliability of the information system and close a number of technical risks.
The event was held at the Swissotel conference center in Moscow, and the participants and the jury resided in the hotel itself.
We deliberately position the Russian Code Cup 2012 as a primacy among Russian-speaking programmers, in contrast to a number of other international tournaments where English is the main one, but there are no restrictions on geography.
The day before the tournament, the Mail.Ru Group specialists and managers talked about the technical problems being solved in the company. The topics of the reports were relevant to the knowledge and experience of the students - this included machine learning from the head of the ranking department Alexey Voropayev and analyst Mail.Ru Group Eduard Tyantov , and features of building game objects from the technical director and head of the game mechanics Allods Online team Ilya Vaisman . Konstantin Osipov, Tarantool Development Manager, and Alexander Gorny, CIO Mail.Ru Group, spoke about their experience. The Mail.Ru Group CEO Dmitry Grishin opened the Russian Code Cup for the finalists.
Broadcast, technology, Internet and other organizational issues
The Russian Code Cup 2012 was accompanied by video broadcasting - it could be viewed both on the tournament website and on the links from the main Mail.Ru page.
The live broadcast of programming tournaments is a rather unusual format for the Internet. For the “uninitiated,” what the guys are doing in the closed hall of the convention center is a dark forest. Organizing a live broadcast, while maintaining entertainment and information for the widest audience - not an easy task. After all, the current ranking table is always available on the website in a separate section, and a typical picture from the hall where the tournament is held is the concentrated faces of the participants, illuminated by laptop screens.
Therefore, we had interviews, discussions, round tables - with the jury, with invited guests, as well as the inclusion of a rating table with comments of experts on the air.
We are faced with a video delay problem on the air (from several seconds to a minute). For the interview this does not create any problems, but for the rating table this is important - the data in it must be relevant at the time of its demonstration. The ideal solution to this problem is practically non-existent, primarily due to the peculiarities of the broadcast technology itself on the network, but this delay can be markedly reduced in various ways.
The second problem was the use of infographics in the video stream. Most users do not expand the video broadcast to full screen, and to achieve satisfactory readability of the text (surnames, points, nicknames) in a relatively low resolution and with the characteristic compression of the video while maintaining the usual look of the table was not easy. We coped with this by simplifying the design and breaking the table into slides.
To solve this problem, the video client-side technology would be much more suitable, when at the right moment a quality photo or vector image is included in the stream at the right moment, and as a result, the user receives an image of a table or scheme that does not contain artifacts typical for video codecs. We haven’t found any suitable solutions for such a task, I will be glad to any advice and suggestions.
At the end of the broadcast: videos and photos from the event can already be viewed on the site Russian Code Cup 2012 .
The second potentially narrow point could be the Internet on the site. After all, if the network turns off, the tournament will have to be suspended, or even terminated. In order to be calm about this, a three-level backup system was built, including switching the cable Internet to Wi-Fi, and in case of a failure, also to 4G. Two hours before the final, miracles really began to happen to the Internet, and we already began to slowly include a reserve, but everything worked out, and by the time the tournament began, the Internet had fully recovered.
The necessary office equipment was reserved, a quick scaling of registration was performed if necessary. Fortunately, none of the risks involved have worked and everything went smoothly.
Substantial part: round tables and panel discussion
While the guests were gathering, the studio actively discussed current issues in the field of IT.
At the "round table" devoted to the issues of sports programming, they discussed the idea of ​​creating an all-Russian federation of sports programming. After all, there are all-Russian sports federations of go, ice stock, darts, city sports, orienteering or softball. Interestingly, the list of duties of any sports federation includes the requirement “to participate in the prevention of doping in sport and in the fight against it, as well as in counteracting the manifestations of any forms of discrimination and violence in sport”. We very much hope that the problem of doping will not be a threat to sports programming in the coming years.
The Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolay Nikiforov, the rectors Vladimir Vasilyev (NRU ITMO) and Anatoly Alexandrov (Moscow State Technical University na Bauman) were invited to the panel discussion. Together with the CEO of Mail.Ru Group Dmitry Grishin, the guests during the discussion raised issues of the quality of IT education in Russia. So it was possible to hear the point of view on the problems of training IT staff on all three sides - the state, education and business. This discussion can be viewed in its entirety on the official site of RussianCodeCup.ru
Interactive on-site entertainment and cultural program
For the guests of the Russian Code Cup, we organized several IT-entertainment. For example, here are such sphere-races - you need to hold an iPhone / iPad controlled Orbotix Sphero ball around the track and come to the finish line first.
The ball itself is connected with a tablet or phone via Bluetooth. By command from a mobile device, you can arbitrarily change the direction of movement. Evil tongues say that the flywheel spun by batteries is to blame for everything, but we know that in fact there is a little hamster with electrodes inside it.
Among other interactive entertainment - for example, a video wall, adding witty statements on IT topics "in bubbles" over a live picture from the room. adds a clever idea to everyone passing by, or a similar video wall on which a simple drawing could be drawn with hand movements.
And at the end of the day, on the yacht, before the entertainment program, everyone could learn a lot about the development for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotic kit - a gift from the Mail.Ru Group to all the finalists of the Russian Code Cup. They showed and told the coach of the teams on the motivational robotics of the international level Vladimir Efgrafov and the winner of the international robotic competitions Anatoly Vozhdayev. Together with this designer, the guys also received a book by John Hansen "LEGO Mindstorms NXT Power Programming: Robotics in C". Who knows, maybe we will see one of them also at Eurobot? ..
The strongest programmers and their trophies
The first place in the Russian Code Cup 2012 was taken by Vladislav Epifanov . It is worth noting that he consistently and confidently occupied the first places in the qualifying round and in the qualifying. In the final, he was the only one to solve five problems. For him, the Russian Code Cup 2012 is the first serious victory, but not the first serious experience: Vladislav is twice the finalist of Google Code Jam, and last year he finished fifth in the Russian Code Cup 2011. In the world TopCoder rating, Vladislav is ranked sixteenth. In addition to the absolute victory in the Russian Code Cup 2012, we also noted him as the first of all finalists who solved problems C and F. Problem F was rather difficult, only five people coped with it. Vladislav received the first prize - 10,000 US dollars.
This year, the second place was taken by Natalya Bondarenko . We have only two girls in the final, and getting into the top three of one of them was a surprise for everyone. Congratulations once again to Natalya, she is great! Shortly before the end of the tournament, a round table was held on sports programming, where Mikhail Mirzayanov talked about Natasha:
“I have known Natasha Bondarenko for many years. I led a circle in one of the Saratov schools, and she came there to me, while she was still an eighth grader. Therefore, I am not surprised to see her on the second line, knowing about her level of knowledge, about her level of preparation. She trained for many years at the Olympiad Training Center in Saratov, while still studying at our schoolgirl. She was a captain in one of the strongest teams. She became the champion of Russia, having won the semi-finals in St. Petersburg in2008 , and in2009 they finished fourth in the World Cup final. I would like to note its bright success - after graduating from university, she defended her Ph.D. thesis exactly six months later, becoming a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences. I was on her defense, the council spoke very complimentary words about her work. It sounded like this: scientists with big names from Ukraine decided such a particular case, and in Novosibirsk other scientists solved another special case, and Natasha solved this problem entirely, thereby completely closing the question on it and its solution. ”
The third place was taken by Egor Kulikov . Egor was one of the favorites of the RCC, passed to the finals of five Google Code Jam, and in one of them, two years ago, took first place.
It is worth noting Eugene Kapun - two-time world champion ACM-ICPC (as part of a team from NRU ITMO). Eugene managed to solve only one of all the finalists one of the most difficult tasks of the tournament - task E.
Plans for RCC 2013
Probably next year we will not only hold the Russian Code Cup 2013 in a new location (in the new office of Mail.Ru Group ), but also in a slightly changed format. It is likely that a “marathon” test will be added, with “long”, more practical tasks around web technologies, algorithms, and maybe even elements of system programming. Perhaps we will make the tasks themselves the subject of a separate competition, and we will make the participation in such a competition as a team competition. Take something better with Challenge24 . Add a game round - like the ACM-ICPC Challenge . What do you think?
Thank.
Thank you for participating, for participating in the participation. The next post about the Russian Code Cup will be longer and more difficult - we will sort out all the tasks from the tournament in great detail.
Team Russian Code Cup
PS A small announcement. Exactly one month later, on October 17th, we start the second Technology Forum 2012 this year. Registration is open, participation is free, but the number of places is limited. In addition to Mail.Ru specialists, Western speakers from Opera, AJAX.org and other companies are in the program. Stories about past Forums - autumn and spring .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/151614/
All Articles