Codeforces is a website that hosts

competitive programming Competitive programming is a mind sport usually held over the Internet or a local network, involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications. Contestants are referred to as ''sport programmers''. Competitive progra ...

contests. It is maintained by a group of competitive programmers from

ITMO University ITMO University (russian: Университет ИТМО) is a state-supported university in Saint Petersburg and is one of Russia's National Research Universities. ITMO University is one of 15 Russian universities that were selected to particip ...

led by Mikhail Mirzayanov. Since 2013, Codeforces claims to surpass

Topcoder Topcoder (formerly TopCoder) is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community s ...

in terms of active contestants. As of 2018, it has over 600,000 registered users. Codeforces along with other similar websites are used by top sport programmers like Gennady Korotkevich, Petr Mitrichev, Benjamin Qi and Makoto Soejima, and by other programmers interested in furthering their careers.

Overview

The Codeforces platform is typically used when preparing for competitive programming contests and it offers the following features: * Short (2-hours) contests, called "Codeforces Rounds", held about once a week * Educational contests (2-2.5 hours, with 12 hours (24 hours before Round 45) hacking period), held 2-3 times per month; * Challenge/hack other contestants' solutions; * Solve problems from previous contests for training purposes; * "Polygon" feature for creating and testing problems; * Social networking through internal public blogs. Codeforces logo

Rating system

Contestants are rated by a system similar to

Elo rating system The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved c ...

. There are usually no prizes for winners, though several times a year special contests are held, in which top performing contestants receive T-shirts. Some bigger contests are hosted on Codeforces base, among them "The Lyft Level 5 Challenge 2018", provided by

Lyft Lyft, Inc. offers mobility as a service, ride-hailing, vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, rental cars, and food delivery in the United States and select cities in Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dyn ...

or "Microsoft Q# Coding Contest — Summer 2018" provided by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

. Contestants are divided into ranks based on their ratings. Since May 2018, users with ratings between 1900 and 2099 can be rated in both Div. 1 and Div. 2 contests. At the same time, Div. 3 was created for users rated below 1600.

History of Codeforces

Codeforces was created by a group of competitive programmers from

Saratov State University Saratov Chernyshevsky State University (russian: Саратовский государственный университет имени Н. Г. Чернышевского, СГУ, transcribed as SGU) is a major higher education and research inst ...

led by Mike Mirzayanov. It was originally created for those interested in solving tasks and taking part in competitions. The first Codeforces Round was held on the February 19, 2010 with 175 participants. As of the end of August 2022 over 800 rounds were held, with over 9000 registered competitors per round on average. Before 2012 Codeforces Rounds were titled "Codeforces Beta Rounds" to indicate that the system was still under development.

Academic use

Codeforces is recommended by many universities. According to

Daniel Sleator Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator (born 10 December 1953) is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 1999, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award (jointly with Robert Tarjan) for the splay tree d ...

, professor of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

at Carnegie Mellon University, competitive programming is valuable in computer science education, because competitors learn to adapt classic algorithms to new problems, thereby improving their understanding of algorithmic concepts. He has used Codeforces problems in his class, 15-295: Competition Programming and Problem Solving.{{Cite web, url=https://contest.cs.cmu.edu/295/f16/, title=15-295: Competition Programming and Problem Solving, Fall 2016, website=cs.cmu.edu

References

External sources