Hello!
Today is November 7th. And this, as you probably know, is a very special day for many ex-USSR citizens. Many years ago on this day the Great October Socialist Revolution happened. I still remember red flags and military equipment on the avenue and the feeling of common joy and holiday. But today, in 2011, we have another revolution — the Codeforces revolution of colors and titles. Hooray!
So, over the last few months our community has grown significantly. If we count the users who have participated in the rated contests over the last 9 months at least once, at the beginning of the year they were 4330, and now — 7615. This is a great step forward! Of course, this leads to a dramatic rating inflation. Most of the ELO-like ratings have the same issue. For example, only A. Karpov had Elo chess rating of more than 2700 in 1979; however, there were as much as 15 people with such rating in 1994, and in 2009 they were 33. In 2001 there were less than 10 red players on TopCoder; in 2005 they were about a hundred and now — more than 250.
A similar effect occurred on Codeforces. It is particularly striking as it is accompanied by a marked audience growth. For this reason it was decided to change the color system . In addition, the record shows that not all participants liked the military ranks. Besides, they are quite far from our intellectual and sporting spirit. Today we will disband Codeforces as a military unit and introduce sport titles. We've mostly used the titles from intellectual sport games to work out the following classification:
| Ratings Range | Color | Title | Division |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2600+ | Red | International grandmaster | 1 |
| 2200 - 2599 | red | Grandmaster | 1 |
| 2050 - 2199 | Orange | International master | 1 |
| 1900 - 2049 | Orange | Master | 1 |
| 1700 - 1899 | Violet | Candidate master | 1 |
| 1500 - 1699 | Blue | Expert | 2 |
| 1350 - 1499 | Green | Specialist | 2 |
| 1200 - 1349 | Green | Pupil | 2 |
| 0 - 1199 | Gray | Newbie | 2 |
In addition, the rating recalculating formula was slightly fixed to slow down the inflation. Now the sum of ratings will not be the constant, but is likely to be slightly falling. In fact, the changes are cosmetic and will be visible only on a series of contests.
I understand that for some of you it will be hard to say good bye to the favorite color, but let's look ahead with optimism — new victories will bring the lost color back color and help to win the proud title of a Grandmaster!
