Winners in our annual international open championship in competitive programming, Yandex.Algorithm, today wiped the sweat off their high brows and took home their prizes.
Yandex.Algorithm is an individual contest, open to anybody who wishes to participate, regardless of education, profession or programming style. This year’s contest involved more than 3,000 competitors from 84 countries, who showed tough competition and great sportsmanship. The top 25 proceeding to the finals included developers from Google, VKontakte, Facebook and students from Saint Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, Moscow State University, and St. Petersburg State University. Many of the finalists were multiple award-winners and champions of the world’s premier team programming championship, ACM ICPC.
The Yandex.Algorithm championship had several stages. The finals took place in the regal interiors of the Vladimir Palace in St. Petersburg. Elimination rounds were held online, on the Yandex.Contest platform – a service created especially for programming education, training and competition. In each round, participants had to solve several algorithmic problems within 100 minutes.
A winner of ACM ICPC 2013, Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus with 3 solutions and -2 minutes of penalty time showed the best result and won the contest. First runner-up, Russia's Evgeny Kapun, also scored 3 points, but his six-minute penalty time put him behind the winner. Also three solutions secured third place for Shih Pi-Hsun from Taiwan, despite his penalty time of 44 minutes. All Yandex.Algorithm champions received cash prizes – 300,000 rubles (about $9,000) for first place, 150,000 rubles (about $4,500) for second and 90,000 (about $3,000) rubles for third.
(left to right: Evgeny Kapun, Gennady Korotkevich, Shih Pi-Hsun)
Specialists from Russia, Belarus, Japan and Poland created the problems to test Yandex.Algorithm competitors. As contest organisers, Yandex staff members were ineligible to compete, but took active part in preparing the championship. Developers from our Minsk office produced problems and tested them on their colleagues in other cities. TopCoder champion Egor Kulikov, of Yandex in St. Petersburg, personally solved every single problem. You can see them here (in Russian).
Yandex.Algorithm was created to support competitive programming in Russia and the CIS, aid the development of the IT industry, and boost ties between specialists from different countries. First held in 2011 within Yandex’s summer school, the championship has now entered a new, international level – in both the number and range of competitors, and in the complexity of problems.
We are happy for the winners and proud to contribute to the thriving programming community around the world.
