Hello CodeForces! This year again, I'd like to invite you to the online mirror of an open championship of Switzerland called HC2 (the Helvetic Coding Contest). A mirror was also held one, two and three years ago.
The Helvetic Coding Contest is a yearly contest held at the EPFL in Lausanne by the PolyProg association. The contest itself took place on April the 13th, but the online mirror is scheduled on Sunday, 7th of July, 10:05 Moscow time. The duration is 4:30.
Rules:
you can participate in teams or individually (1-3 people),
standard ACM-ICPC rules (no hacking),
the contest is not rated,
if you have participated in the onsite contest, please do not participate in the mirror.
The contest this year is Doctor Who-themed. It features 5 series of 2-3 related tasks with increasing difficulty (easy/medium/hard). (For the online mirror, we will skip one series that had appeared in the onsite contest.) Sometimes it may be the case that a solution for the hard version solves all of them, but usually not. We think that the problemset is diverse and interesting, and while the contest is ACM-style, you will find that some problems are not so standard. Most easy&medium problems are even solvable in Python, so you can also recommend this contest to your newbie friends :) We promise to post a nice editorial as soon as the contest ends.
Acknowledgments: the problems were set by bgamlath, DamianS, esrever, milenkoviclazar, Wajeb (who coordinated), and myself. Thanks also go out to people who helped with the statements and testing: anayMehrotra, Michalina Pacholska (who also draws the cows), cdkrot for the Russian statements, KAN for CodeForces coordination, as well as everyone involved in the actual onsite contest, who are too many to name here. We also thank the sponsors Open Systems and nexthink. Lastly, thanks to MikeMirzayanov for CodeForces and Polygon (which was used to prepare the problems).
Finally, in a bit of autopromotion, note that you can use Hightail to automatically test your solutions :) Good luck!
