The final results of Viblo Code Contest 2020 - Who is the winner?

Professional contestants and high quality tests

Mr. Tran Duc Thang - Head of Contest organization share with Sun* News: “This contest attracts many contestants from all parts of the country, especially the young energetic students, they are familiar with the knowledge of discrete math, or data structures and algorithms that they are studying at university.”

Being aware of the variety of contestants’ level, right from the beginning, the organizers have prepared many of Challenges, up to 15. The test is also well classified according to the rank from easy to difficult (from rank E => D => C => B => A => S), so that it has become easier to rank the contestants. In particular, with the most difficult challenge, only 2 contestants successfully submitted, and also the only 2 people who solved all 15 challenges of the contest. The other contestants coming next all overcame 14 Challenges and had to compete with each other based on the number of minus scores due to long test time or wrong submissions. It can be said that the race to the top places has been going on very excitingly until the end.

Unpredictable happening

As soon as the Contest started, the organizers were overwhelmed by the number of visitors, as well as the sudden increase in the number of submissions for the test, causing Viblo Code's system to overload. Although the organizers have thought of this ability before and actively raised the number of Viblo Code servers to 4, they still have to struggle to handle it smoothly.

This is a situation that they are not sure to be happy or sad because the Head of organization team shared that: “On Saturday night, Viblo Code Team had to find every way to solve the situation. They had to add 1, 2, then 3 servers to ensure it meets the needs of the user. In total, from the 4 servers at first, the number of Viblo Code servers has been increased to 7, at nearly 12am.  In which 1 server running the web, 6 servers running the code, including: 3 servers 4 cores 8GB RAM, 2 servers of 6 cores 16GB RAM, and even a server of 2 cores of 4GB RAM must be used”. It can be considered as a challenge in the operation stage, however, on the positive side, it is clear that this also shows the success and attraction of the contest.

The second surprise comes from the ability of the contestants as many of them start and do very quickly. While the Organizes thought that everyone must be busy reading the requirements and thinking of the solution right now, there were many people who finished 2, 3, or 4 different Challenges, including some hard ones.

The group of top contestants in the first hour of the Contest was thought to continue to compete until the end of the competition, however, just at midnight of that day, the ranking had been constantly changing when new factors showed up. The ranking kept changing until the next afternoon with many new names at the top.

Checking information of some candidates, the organization team have realized that most of the top members have a high profile in the Competitive Programming arena, such as having an Expert rank, or a Candidate Master rank on Codeforces. Being able to attract so many professional contestants to the Viblo Code Contest 2020 is considered a success, and appreciation of the organization team.

Mr. Thang has recognized the errors arising in the operation stage by sharing this: “Because of having to prepare quite a lot of tests for this Contest, the Organization team has some mistakes, such as updating the wrong output of test case, or updating the wrong test case. Fortunately, these 2 cases have been discovered quickly in order not to affect many contestants. In addition, there is one more mistake that can directly affect more people. That mistake comes from the first Challenge called “Quyết chí làm ăn" (determination to do business). To be honest, this is also a very “interesting” mistake, that no one is aware of before. Only when there are very few people can solve this very simple challenge, the whole team has decided to find out the problem, and noticed a problem in the difference between the "right" and the "wrong" solution of many contestants"

This technical issue is really helpful, if you are interested, you can check out "Story of Challenge "Quyết chí làm ăn" (Determination to do business) on Viblo Code Contest 2020 and its lessons" of Viblo Team here.

Final results

Finally, Viblo Code Contest 2020 has come to an end and found out the best contestants.