Last time I mentioned, that one of the winners of the 'best event for participants' competition was a girl, who offered participants to take pictures based on tasks like "take a picture of yourself and <description of other person> doing <description of setting>". Even though that is a really awesome event, very few people were interested in it, which was very sad.

TopCoder Open 2011 keeps going.

Yesterday we were supposed to hold a poker tournament with a grand prize MacBook Air. There were a lot of people willing to participate, which forced us to split the tournament into two elimination rounds and one final. Out of 16 people who registered for the tournament, 8 were russian-speaking, and all of them appeared to be in the same elimination round. Petr and MikhaelOK advanced from that round, while 7ania7 and theycallhimtom advanced from another one, which was non-russian-speaking. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the elimination rounds, however, we played more poker that day, in the same place, so this picture gives you pretty good understanding of how it looked like (during the elimination round it was a little bit more crowded though):


Last time I didn't publish any pictures of a hotel, except one view out of the window. The hotel is called The Westin Diplomat.


It is located in a Hollywood city. The city is in 20 minutes of driving from Miami, however it looks like a small village with a lot of palms. The hotel looks weird in such a setting, since essentially it is 36-storey skyscraper. It is located right next to the Ocean shore, such that the moment you leave the hotel, you find yourself on the beach.

Today I and Eric, CEO of MemSQL, went to Florida, to the Hollywood city, to visit TopCoder Open 2011, which we sponsor. Intel and Facebook are two other sponsors.
We left San Francisco at 8 AM. In SFO we saw Petr. That made us believe, that he moved to the Valley, which turned out not to be the case.
First thing you see in the hotel is TopCoder banner. Do you know the company, which is listed third in the sponsors list? :о


We went to a Ballroom, where we needed to install our booth. Intel has entire corner in the ballroom, while we and Facebook have small table and a screen. This is how it looks like:


When booth had been installed, we checked in to the room. According to what I heard from competitors, TopCoder provided them with rooms with no ocean view. Since we didn't have room provided by topcoder, for ourselves we got the one with the view.


In 2008, when I was visiting all the programming events, I was taking pictures of all the TopCoders, and other people, who were related to the community, with a stuffed pig. Some of those pictures you can find in my blog here. This time three more people didn't manage to avoid my camera. One of them is Ivan Metelsky, who is working on topcoder SRMs, and also is a judge on the TCO:

Two other are Artem Rakhov and Mike Mirzayanov, who are well known on this website :)

Hello!

Yesterday I got to the Hollywood (not in California, but in Florida). Then I came out from airport, I felt hot, humid air. Not forgotten feeling from the ACM-ICPC finals tried to fool my brain, that I was not leaving Florida.

I was flying with Misha Kever (which the handle here?). Artem Rakhov (RAD) appeared when I was asleep. It seems that he has arrived together with Sergey Rogulenko(SergeyRogulenko).

It turned out that the rainy season is not over. So here “cloudy, possible rain." I did not like the ocean — very warm, quite without the waves, it is necessary to overcome large distance to swim on depth.

By the way, I’m in the room #1760. It will be good to see in comments rooms of other finalists.

As they say, to be continued ...

Hello everybody! My name is Gerald Agapov. I study at Saratov State University. Today I present you the set of, I hope interesting, problems. Good luck to all!

Hi!

I regret to inform you that the Codeforces Beta Round #88 is rescheduled for September, 23 (Friday), 15:00 (UTC). The main reason lies in me — because of trip to TopCoder Open, I must leave Saratov, and I can't make the round being in a train, in the middle ofendless Russian steppes.

I hope that the new schedule will be comfortable for some of you, and other will try to adjust plans to the schedule.

Hi all, 

As some of you have already noticed, we are introducing the innovation &mdash a virtual contest system. I guess this term was invented as far back as in 2002, as we were working on the site http://acm.sgu.ru/. Besides we were the first ones to come up with and carry out the interesting idea: enable the users to run the past contests in a special mode that would imitate a real competition. It feels just like a real contest with real contestants competing alongside with the participant who writes a virtual contest.

The idea was a success and it was picked up by some online judges. Although frankly speaking, those ideas haven't been carried out by the many.

And now it's time to introduce the virtual contest system to Codeforces! Of course, the original Codeforces rules aren't easily converted to virtual form. That's why all past Codeforces contests will be available as virtual contests by ACM-ICPC rules. In light of oncoming ACM-ICPC subregional and regional contests it can be regarded as yet another opportunity to train.

Virtual contests are available to individuals as well as to teams. If you participate as a team, please make sure that the registered team represents all your team members and nobody else. If it is not the case, change it. So far there's only one contest available for alpha-testing: it's Codeforces Beta Round #76 (Div. 2 Only), but you won't have to wait much - soon all contests will be available in this mode. Now all the past contests are available as virtual contests.

When you take part in virtual contests please follow those simple rules:

• don't participate if you've already seen the tasks;
• don't participate if you only want to commit one problem or if you don't want/can't participate in the whole contest;
• during the contest don't read tutorials, don't use somebody else's code, don't talk to other people;
• try to make it an efficient and enjoyable training!

I expect some of you to write the offered contest virtually and share your impressions. For example, JKeeJ1e30 has already participated!

I hope you like the new opportunities. We'll add something, too, to give the system final flourish, but in any way we're waiting for your commentaries rich in interesting ideas and suggestions.