SnackDown is envisioned to be an annual multi-round global programming tournament conducted by CodeChef. The aim with SnackDown is to pit the best programming minds from across the globe against each other for the ultimate title of “SnackDown Champions.” Apart from the bragging right and the title comes with a wide assortment of cool merchandises, a hefty cash award, and a Software Engineering job offer with Directi, the parent company of CodeChef. After multiple online rounds the best teams are flown down for the grand finale at the CodeChef headquarters, Directiplex in Mumbai, India.
SnackDown is the largest onsite programming event held in India, with participation of teams from all over the globe. More importantly, it is open for anyone with a knack of programming. Whether you are studying in school, a college student, a working professional, a home-schooled wonder or a self taught programming brilliance, you are absolutely eligible to take part and win prizes.
Register here! and keep starring the updates, it may do a trick.
Prizes:
1st: $10,000 2nd: $5,000 3rd: $3,000 and lot more
Auto comment: topic has been updated by daga (previous revision, new revision, compare).
Auto comment: topic has been updated by daga (previous revision, new revision, compare).
So, the only important round (the Online Elimination) takes place at 3:30am CET?
It seems weird that you (the organizers) send all these email surveys to see which dates work for the most people, etc., only to schedule the main contest in the middle of the night for most of them (i.e. Europe including western Russia)...
Even for people in India and China it would be around 7 in the morning. The timing doesn't make any sense.
I will talk with organizers about this.
No change so far. Way to make their biggest event of the year a failure...
@dj3500 we are looking into it and figuring out a good time for elimination round, we shall soon update you on this.
If you change it to something reasonable, then maybe you want to send out an email to everyone (many people might have already given up on participating because of this). (Shouldn't be a problem since you already send these out rather often :) )
We will certainly do this. The main reason we had to propose the given time was because of the tight schedule around that time. We have our own CookOff at night 9:30 PM IST on the same day.
However, we have certainly taken this feedback very seriously, and are contemplating preponing our CookOff to a week earlier (something that we have never done till date) and try and put the round at that time. Hopefully this will fix the problem.
@dj3500 we have re-scheduled the elimination round. It will now start at 7:30 PM IST on 19th June please check your time zone here. More information about the re-schedule can be found on our blog post here.
Any strong reason for limiting teams to participants from the same institution/organization?
I mean, I would maybe understand if it was some sort of high school competition (uni vs uni spirit and all that), but this seems to be an open to every age and occupation type of event. Seems to me the only thing the limitation accomplishes is extra work for organizers (having to request a proof of being in the same organization and all) and, of course, my favorite part — leaving me with no team yet again for no reason at all. Thanks, I guess.
@HellKitsune At CodeChef, we constantly strive to cultivate programming culture in different institutes through our competitions. By bringing in the restriction, we make sure both the team members are from the same institute/organization, we give chance to a newbie to team up with a midlevel programmer, a midlevel programmer with a top level programmer, and a top level programmer with a programming god. In absence of this restriction the teams will have only the top guys pairing with the top guys leaving the mid and beginner level programmers seeking for someone to team up with. In addition, it makes it a matter of pride for the participants to represent their institution/organization on global competitions (as you mentioned). We hope you understand what we are trying to do here. If you still have any concerns, please feel free to get in touch with us.
If a contestant is from an organization in which there are lots of competitive programmers — anyway you'll have top guys pairing, as most likely skilled guys will not team up with beginners (unless they simply want to have fun with their friends and don't aim at reaching good result).
What's the point of that part about newbie teaming up with skilled guy? Not forcing it sounds like a better idea for stimulating contestants to improve — knowing that you are so weak that other contestants don't want to be in a team with you sounds like a good reason to work on improving yourself.
And now here are a few words about that matter of pride part. Let's say I'm unemployed graduate. Maybe because of that "matter of pride" I want to represent a university from which I graduated some time ago (with some of it's current or past students) — I am not a student, therefore I can't do that. Also I'm unemployed, which means that I can't represent some organization. In fact in this situation I can't participate in this contest in any team :) But, of course, there is a luxury of taking part in the contest as a single member team :)
Most of your points are valid.
We have taken note of all these points, and we will certainly consider them in the next edition of Snackdown.
Let me give you a bit of a context to know how things have come to this point.
We always wanted Snackdown to be more of an institution level contest starting from the first edition. Snackdown was conceived on the model of ICPC in its first edition in the year 2010. However, back then we only had universities taking part. A lot has changed since then and we opened it up to organisations and high school last year.
Pitting a high school against a top corporation or a top university has its own charm for those who want an underdog to outperform the best and the prospect of that happening swayed us a bit in the favour of the existing format.
We have extended the same format this year with the only major change being inviting the top global teams onsite to be held in Mumbai, India. And we are really excited to meet the international teams.
There was no such request or suggestion then and we never bothered to open it up to any combinations to form teams or may be that the requests existed but were not loud enough to reach us.
We have been thinking about Egor's suggestions since the time he has put them forward and within our team we have been debating by taking both sides.
At this year's ICPC world finals I met Petr and invited him to take part in Snackdown. He too raised the same concern and said he did not like the rule. He asked me to change it and he will consider taking part.
We do understand that those who are not employed or cannot form a team, it is quite unfair to them. There are also very bright home schooled students who have not been able to form teams. There have been many requests from high school students in India too to form teams with students from other schools, since we do not have a great competitive programming culture in India in high schools and finding a good partner in the same school is a problem.
However, we do need to understand that this is a team competition. And there has to be some criteria of team formation. There has to be some parameter that binds the two members together. We want Snackdown to continue as a team competition. Whether we allow family members to form a team is something worth pondering upon. Or may be restrict it on region/nationality? I am just thinking aloud. If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to share. We will be happy to consider all of them.
We have taken down all the points, and before we announce Snackdown for next year, we will sit down on the drawing board from scratch with all your suggestions on how to allow team formation.
Till then, we invite you to be a part of this edition and munch on the exciting problems that are coming your way. It is going to be a great fun event, even if you are unable to form a team with a top partner of your choice, it will have a lot to look forward to.
Pitting a high school against a top corporation or a top university [...]
You can give prizes to best teams consisting of high-schoolers only.
There has to be some parameter that binds the two members together.
This is your main point. I have read your comment twice and I still don't get what is the reason for that. Teams are formed by people who know each other. Who likely at least used to compete together. Why isn't it enough?
Also, note that many other contests don't have this requirement and nobody complains about it.
We have made it open this year. Hope you will like it now. :)
https://www.codechef.com/snackdown/2017
PS: Confession — This single post on CF and the number of negative comments on my explanation was one of the most influential reasons for us to remove the constraint this time.
I honestly can't see the point. In fact, in absence of the same organisation restriction, contrary to your claim, not only high level guys but everyone will have a better chance of finding a suitable teammate. I think this restriction can only lead to many single-person teams.
I wanted to form a team with my cousin, but was unable to, due to your weird rules.
I was just about to register now with a friend from another institution. I asked him about his handle and wrote it in then saw a red message. Thought I got his handle wrong and asked him to make sure he gave me his handle right.
When he gave me the link to his profile and I made sure I have the right handle. I read the red error message carefully and understood that there's such a rule. Something you'd never expect in a contest like that. Your reasons make no sense anyways.
In my school there is no one who has ever heard CP except me so you know what difficulties I am facing. I am left all alone in a team and it's sure a team can do better than an individual. P.S I have qualified
Me and my partner hastily formed two separate teams but now we want to club both of them in one. So please tell me how to club both the teams into one.
Is anyone else constantly getting errors 405 (Not Allowed) and 503 (Internal Server Error)?
It's just a qualification round, so it doesn't matter, but it looks like the site is extremely unreliable.
I suppose it's because of 2000 people submitting the easiest problem in a few minutes.
You're only getting 405 and 503? Pfft, I have like a collector's edition of errors from the last hour. I could try selling them unsuccessfully, only for them to become highly valuable after I died.
Also, it looks like the rankings don't update properly. There are a lot of teams with 3 problems solved with score 2, or 4 problems solved and a total score of 3.
Just imagine what will happen during the important (short) round.
The situation might not be as bad as only a total of 2000 teams will take part in the short round. Assuming tougher problems are given there shouldn't be a flood of submissions at any point of time.
At least I hope that is the case.
Right now, there are 3000 teams with at least one AC in the leaderboard. Maybe some didn't manage to get the easiest problem accepted so far but let's also note that the contest started more than an hour ago. I think that short rounds will be funny.
Now all of a sudden I get "You are not allowed to check this content" when trying to see the rankings.
Ahhh, and I also have a penalty of minus 436000 hours for problem K-Good Words. With a penalty that good, I might win the contest xD!
maybe they restricted the access to the standings in order to speed up the load of the other pages. Anyway, let's hope they fix this issues before round 1A
Hi,
I went to submit and it told me I wasn't part of a team which was registered.
Afterwards, I looked at the main page and it said only 9 teams (a few more now) were registered.
Should I re-register or wait for CodeChef to address this issue? My team name is said to be "taken" when I try to register again.
Thanks in advance.
Yeah the same thing happened to me. I think I just got kicked out of my own team? And also now if I try pressing the button that says register again it says "you can't register for a contest that's already going on".
UPDATE:
13:10 AM, IST, 28/5: We have stopped team registrations for a little while, as we fix some technical issue from our side. We also are stopping submissions till the issue is fixed.
Under announcements in this link, it appears that they are having technical issues. Hopefully this will be resolved ^_^
I hope I won't have to make a new team (like you, I was kicked out of my own team!).
Is there a plan to hold the contest this year?
I think there is — I got an email "A quick 15 sec survey on SnackDown 2017 schedule" some time ago.