Hello codeforces!

ECPC (Egyptian Collegiate Programming Contest) 2026 has just concluded so I decided to post a blog with the teams qualified to ACPC (Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Contest) 2026. ACPC will be held in the beginning of December.

Congratulations to "Balloons ehh 3awzen 2otat" from AASTMT Cairo for winning ECPC 2026!

If your team qualified, kindly put your Country, University (and College if applicable)/Teens, team name, and your teammates' cf profiles and I will add it to the list.

Best of luck in ACPC!

ACPC

ACPC Teens

Don't even look at the standings or your rating. Compare yourself to yourself yesterday. You are in a competition with your old self, not with cheaters.

If you want to look at standings for fun, there exists an amazing feature I've always used even before AI cheating became a thing. It's called "Friends Standings" (ideally, those are not cheaters and those are people you are actively competing with)

Hello Codeforces,

Earlier this month, the ACPC (African and Arab Collegiate Programming Championship) concluded, determining the teams qualified for the ICPC World Finals from our region.

I decided to write a blog post to gather the full team list somewhere (yes, I know this is very early and most championships are still in March, but I'm so excited anyway, and I already had the script for the ACPC list, so why not!)

To add your team to the list, please comment these details:

• Your region
• Your country
• Your university
• Your team name
• Team members' handles

Wish everyone the best of luck in preparing for the ICPC, and can't wait to meet you all!

Northern Eurasia

Asia East

Asia West

Africa and Arabia

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

Hello codeforces!

ECPC (Egyptian Collegiate Programming Contest) 2025 has just concluded so I decided to post a blog with the teams qualified to ACPC (Africa and Arab Collegiate Programming Contest) 2025. ACPC will be held in the beginning of December.

Huge congratulations to "Tamora fel d2e2a 90" from Cairo University — Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence for winning ECPC 2025!!

If your team qualified, kindly put your Country, University (and College if applicable), teamname and your teammates' cf profiles and I will add it to the list.

Best of luck in ACPC!

University Teams (Details):

University Teams (Ratings):

Teens teams:

Motivation

Dynamic CHT with sets is hard to write. I haven't learned LiChao Tree, but I will share this technique anyways, as it can be applied to other data structures.

AbdelmagedNour explained this to me $$$8$$$ months ago, and it introduced a new way of thinking to me. I could not find any references to something similar on the internet, so I decided I'll give it my best shot here.

If this already has a name, please comment it.

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisities; however, the problem I have posted for checking implementation uses Convex Hull Trick. Please read this blog if you don't know about it.

The problem:

Assume we have a data structure which can add an element in $$$O(A)$$$ and query in $$$O(Q)$$$; however, elements have to be added in monotonic order of some valid comparison function. If we receive the elements in monotonic order, we have no problems! But what if we don't? My claim is that it is possible to add all $$$N$$$ elements in amortized $$$O(AN \log N)$$$, and query for our property in $$$O(Q \log N)$$$. Usually we want to query the maximum element/minimum element, or any property in which we can easily merge $$$2$$$ possible answers.

A classical example of this is the convex hull trick data structure. This data structure allows us to insert lines in the form $$$y = mx + c$$$, and query the minimum/maximum value of $$$y$$$ for a given $$$x$$$. It works in amortized $$$O(n)$$$ where $$$n$$$ is the number of lines added. However, this assumes that lines are sorted in monotonic order of their slopes. What if they aren't?

Initially we create an array $$$blk$$$ of size $$$\lceil{\log N}\rceil$$$. $$$blk[i]$$$ will store a version of our data structure of size $$$2^i$$$, initially, $$$blk[i]$$$ is empty for all $$$i$$$.

Now, to add the first element, we just add it to $$$blk[0]$$$; but for the second element, we clear $$$blk[0]$$$, use merge sort to sort $$$blk[0]$$$ and the second element, and insert them into $$$blk[1]$$$. The third element is inserted into $$$blk[0]$$$, the fourth is merged using merge sort with $$$blk[0],blk[1]$$$, and they are all inserted into $$$blk[2]$$$, (and $$$blk[0],blk[1]$$$ are emptied).

A simple code demonstrating it would look something like this:

DS merge(DS& a, DS& b) {
 // This function merges the 2 sorted data structures. This would depend on how the data structure works.
}
void insert(T element) {
  DS current;
  current.insert(element);
  int index = 0;
  while (blk[index].size > 0) {
   current = merge(current, blk[index]), blk[index].clear();
   index++;
  }
  blk[index] = current;
}

Why is the complexity amortized $$$O(AN \log N)$$$?

Notice that each element you add will go through at most $$$\log N$$$ places in the $$$blk$$$ array, and we add $$$N$$$ elements, each of which needs $$$O(A)$$$ to be inserted into the data structure, so it amortizes to $$$O(AN \log N)$$$.

Now, to query on this data structure, we choose the best possible answer throughout all non empty data structures in $$$blk$$$.

A simple code demonstrating it would like this:

T query(U input) {
  T ans = identity;
  for (auto& ds : blk) {
    if (ds.empty()) continue;
    ans = better(ans, ds.query(input)); // better returns whichever answer is better, or merges them, again, some things change depending on the data structure.
  }
}

The complexity of this is clearly $$$O(QX \log N)$$$, where $$$O(X)$$$ is the complexity of the better function.

As a practice for this technique, you can solve this problem.

If you know any more problems which apply this technique (with any data structure), please comment and I'll add it to the list :)

P.S. This is my first educational blog, if there's any mistake or any improvements I can make, please criticize me in the comments :)

A lot of people are sitting for their IGCSEs/A levels in the upcoming month. Good luck to those who are! That doesn't mean you should quit competitive programming for this month, try to practice and solve 1 or 2 problems daily regardless :)

Hello, there seems to be a lot of CLion users on macOS who cannot seem to set CLion to use G++ instead of clang++

As we all know G++ is the preferred compiler for competitive programmers as it has a lot to offer (for example bits/stdc++.h, and the Policy Based Data Structures such as ordered_sets)

So, here's a guide to get G++ working on macOS! Firstly, you need to ensure homebrew is installed, you can install it from https://brew.sh After installing it, and adding it to your path, execute the command brew install gcc After executing this and refreshing your terminal. Make sure you now have access to the commands gcc-12 and g++-12 After ensuring they are available, open CLion settings, go to Build, Execution, Deployment -> Toolchains set the build tool to /usr/bin/make, C compiler to whatever the terminal says after executing whereis gcc-12, and C++ compiler to whatever the terminal says after executing whereis g++-12, for example, in my laptop it was these paths: /usr/bin/make , /opt/homebrew/bin/gcc-12 , /opt/homebrew/bin/g++-12

After refreshing CLion, you should be able to be a GCC enjoyer!

I hope that helps someone :D