Yandex Blog

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.

Yandex School of Data Analysis graduates Mikhail Kolupayev and Vyacheslav Alipov have won bronze medals at the World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC). The 2014 graduates of the school competed in this week’s finals in Yekaterinburg as members of the National Research University Higher School of Economics team.

Their victory comes just a week after Mikhail and Vyacheslav celebrated graduating from the School of Data Analysis, where they distinguished themselves by taking a record-breaking number of courses and successfully completing them all – 19 and 20, respectively. The third member of the HSE team, Alexander Kuprin, recently worked at Yandex.

ACM ICPC is the premier team programming championship worldwide and the most renowned competition of its kind.

First place at ACM ICPC 2014 went to a team from St. Petersburg State University. Team members Dmitry Egorov and Egor Suvorov are students of St. Petersburg’s Computer Science Center, which the School of Data Analysis helped create. The other gold medal-winning teams (ACM ICPC awards gold to the top four) are from Moscow State University, Peking University and the National Taiwan University.

Yandex congratulates the winners and place-getters, and looks forward to the Algorithm-2014 individual programming finals this August in Berlin, organised by the company.

Yandex.Algorithm 2014 will have its final round on the 1st of August on the premises of Yandex's newly opened Berlin office. In addition to showing their skills in competitive programming, those reaching the final round of the contest will have an opportunity to socialise and browse the city's famous attractions during the three days of the finals.

Last year's event gathered more than three thousand participants from 84 countries, including 16 programmers from Germany, six Swiss nationals and two Austrians. One of the German contestants qualified 20th in the final round, which was held in one of St. Petersburg's most magnificent palaces and saw a Belarusian win the competition, with a Russian national scoring second and a student from Taiwan finishing in the third place.

The Yandex.Algorithm contest is open to everyone regardless of their educational background, location or occupation. The official language of the competition is English. The total prize fund for this competition is 540,000 roubles (about €10,800), with the major portion – 300,000 roubles (about €6,000) – going to the winner. The second and third places will give their winners 150,000 roubles (about €3,000) and 90,000 roubles (€1,800) respectively.

The programming championship will consist of six rounds that will last 100 minutes each. The warm-up round will take place on May 16. Registered contestants will need to solve at least one problem to participate in the qualifying round, which will be held one week after that – on May 25. The three championship rounds will be held online from July 1 to July 15 and will determine 25 top performers who will compete in the finals in Berlin on August 1.

Tasks in the Yandex.Algorithm contest are provided by the Yandex experts, who, according to the rules of the contest, cannot compete, but can contribute to the contest as part of the international organising team, which includes experienced experts from Russia, Poland and the United States.

In contrast to other programming competitions, Yandex.Algorithm allows contestants to choose when and how their solutions are evaluated – individually and right after submission, or in total and only when all of the solutions have been submitted. The first option gives additional points to each solution, although it also removes an opportunity to correct a solution before submitting. This arrangement gives contestants more flexibility in their competitive strategy and a better chance to win.