Hello Codeforces!
DragonByte 2026 is over.
1,300 people registered for the competition. After the qualification and online rounds, 20 contestants made it to the onsite finals in Bratislava.
Our goal was simple: make DragonByte genuinely hard, even for very strong competitive programmers.
We think we managed that.
During the finals, misof, who led the team behind the problems, looked at the preliminary standings and said:
“The TOP 3 is OK, but I expected them to have +100 more points on average. The rest is suffering.”
That was a pretty accurate summary of the day.
The podium
1st place: Radewoosh 2nd place: Petr 3rd place: peti1234
Was it hard enough? Apparently, yes.
After the contest, [user:Petr]told us:
“The challenge was much harder than I expected.”
We also asked Errichto what he thought:
“A few years back, for us competitive programmers there was a competition called Google Code Jam. For us, it was ‘The Contest.’ I think DragonByte is, in terms of quality, the closest thing to Google Code Jam, and nowadays the hardest individual coding challenge that exists.”
That was probably the best validation we could ask for.
Want to try the problems? The DragonByte archive is here:
You can find the 2026 problems, solutions, scoreboards and additional materials there.
Give them a try. And if they make you suffer a little, that is probably working as intended.
Thanks to everyone who registered, competed, discussed the problems and helped us make DragonByte 2026 happen.
See you next time.
