Last Friday, on May 17, CROC finishes the All-Russian Open Programming Championship. The CROC company (together with Codeforces) holds a competition for the best coders of our country for the second year in a row.

Informational technologies are a dynamic habitat where the best minds dwell and sometimes innovative ideas come up at a great speed! This time the organizers stated that the championship is all-Russian but they were surprised to see the championship interest extending beyond the national border.

The interest towards the competition was such that we had many participants from Russia, former Sovyet republics and even far away countries. On this championship, coders solve sports programming problems: to win, they need to come up with effective algorithms, code them quickly, consider all non-typical situations. Besides, there is the additional element of looking for mistakes in other participants' codes and suggest the tests that fail their rivals' codes. The special feature of the contest is the "Code Game Challenge" play round, for which we singled out a special day., — says Sergey Strelkov, the head of the CROC company software development department.

Dmitry Matov from Saratov was humble and skeptical about his chances to win, pointing out the high level of the Championship:

It's the second time I've taken part in the CROC championship. There are few such championships in Russia – you can count the companies that support spots programming like that on the fingers of one hand.

The CROC Championship took part in several stages: it started at the qualification round on April, 13 the internet elimination rounds took place on April, 15 and 22 and finally, the Championship Finals took place in the CROC Moscow office on May, 16 and 17.

The finalists included 3 participants from Belarus, 3 from Ukraine, 3 Polish and one Japanese coder:

The participants of the Finals had pleasant surprises ahead of them. They meet the championship organizers in the CROC innovative office, they went for an excursion to the CROC Data Analysis Centre and took part in an exciting play round:

--- The participants had to implement strategies for hockey teams with a goalkeeper and two players. They had quite little time to write a code that coordinates the players and then compete with other teams. It was interesting and it was fun! — says one of the finalists.

Gennady Korotkievich, a student of St. Petersburg National Information Research Institute of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, won the IT hockey, and the Championship:

It was a challenging competition with challenging problems and challenging participants. That's what makes it interesting for the participants and I guess, for the spectators, too.

Besides, Gennady noted that the CROC Championship for young programmers is a great opportunity to compete with the best young programmers and communicate with people from other cities and even countries. Most of all, this provides the personal growth perspective as well as rising interest to sports programming in Russia.

We remind you that the winner was awarded with 100 000 rubles. Egor Kulikov and Evgeny Kapun, the participants who got the second and third prizes, won 70 000 and 50 000 rubles, correspondingly. The full results are available by this link.

The 2013 Open All-Russia CROC Championship is over. We congratulate the winners but we do not say bye! Look out for the CROC IT news to be among the best. And win!