Hello everybody!

I would like to announce the first BioInformatics Contest organized by Bioinformatics Institute.

The contest is hosted on Stepik platform. You can already register and become familiar with the rules and the testing system. Note, that you have to sign the rules, otherwise, you will not be able to participate.

The contest consists of two rounds:

• The Qualification Round will be held during one week from January 23 (7AM UTC) to January 29 (11 PM UTC).
• The Final Round will be held during 24 hours starting at February 18 (12:00 AM UTC).

There will be prizes for Top 10-20, but they are currently kept in secret. (Note, there will be no money prizes. :-))

All other information related to rounds is located at FAQ.

Why bioinformatics?

We think, that this is one of the most important fields of modern applied Computer Science and we would like to introduce this field to everybody who is interested in something new aside from Olympiad Programming and Software Engineering :-). Probably, somebody will find it interesting and will want to choose this path in his career.

If there will be such a person in Saint Petersburg, Russia, you could apply for a one year course at Bioinformatics Institute.

What type of problems will be there?

We have ACM-style (exact) and Challenge24-style (approximate) problems. This is our first try to do contest with approximate problems, so we could not be sure that everything will go smoothly but we hope so. At least, we tried to prepare interesting problems. Do not worry, most of the problems should be solvable without a knowledge of biology.

Who prepares the contest?

The contest is prepared by the team from ITMO University: Alexey Sergushichev, chavit, Anna Malova, izban, GShark, VArtem and me.

Good luck!

UPD: The Qualification Round has started!

UPD2: Less than two days left till the end of the Qualification Round!