Yandex's annual competitive programming championship, Yandex.Algorithm, has produced its winners. The top winner is Gennady Korotkevich of Belarus (currently a student of St. Petersburg ITMO University) with four solutions out of a possible six and -66 minutes of penalty time. He received his well-deserved 300,000 rubles (about €6,000 of the total prize fund of €10,800) – this is the second time in a row that he has won the grand prix of Yandex.Algorithm.
Kazuhiro Hosaka (Tokyo University, Japan) also solved four problems but with -90 minutes of penalty time, and was awarded 150,000 rubles (about €3,000) of the prize fund and second place. And student Qinshi Wang from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) claimed the remaining 90,000 (€1,800) by solving four problems with -125 minutes of penalty time and finishing in third place.
The final round of Yandex.Algorithm took place on August 1 at the Radisson Blu SAS Hotel in Berlin, just next door to newly opened Yandex R&D office in the capital of Germany.
Having started in 2011 with only a few programmers flexing their algorithmic muscles in a special event organised by Yandex's Summer School, this year Yandex.Algorithm saw 3,890 competitors from 72 countries vying for a place in the finals. Luck, reinforced with talent and skill, was on the side of 25 participants from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, China, Taiwan, Japan and the United States who reached the final round.
Competition in the finals was tough, as expected, with some of the world's strongest players in competitive programming showing what they are worth against previous Yandex.Algorithm winners, as well as multiple champions of other renowned international championships, including ACM ICPC and TopCoder Open, and hands-on computer engineers working at Facebook and Google. Yandex employees are excluded from participation under the terms and conditions of the contest.
All problems in the contest, including the six algorithmic tasks in the final round, were developed by a team of professional computer engineers and active competitive programmers from Carnegie Mellon University, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg State University, Google and Yandex. You can see the problems and solutions here. In addition to having practical experience solving problems similar to those presented in the contest on a daily basis, the Yandex specialists who have contributed to the contest share their knowledge with students at the Yandex School of Data Analysis.
The Yandex School of Data Analysis is a free Master’s-level program in computer science and data analysis offered by Yandex to graduates in engineering, mathematics, computer science or related fields. Three hundred and twenty-two students have graduated from the school since it was founded in 2007. Headquartered in Moscow at Yandex, the School of Data Analysis partners with leading research centres and has branches in other cities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.