Summer 2023 CerealCodes Contest

Jesse Choe

First, I would like to thank everyone who made this contest possible, including our problemsetting, web development, and outreach team members, especially Justin Huang and Patrick Deng, who spent countless hours helping prepare our new website, new contest grader, and problems. This contest has been in the works for around a year, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. I would also like to give a huge shoutout to our sponsors VPlanetCoding, Ottersec, AOPS, Taskade, and Desmos, who helped provide our contest with excellent prizes for the winners and raffles for our participants.

For those of you who don't know, CerealCodes, a competitive programming competition under the nonprofit organization BracketCS, was created to promote computer science fluency to all students worldwide. We founded CerealCodes as a platform to help students learn and pursue their computer science passions through a series of curated high-quality programming problems created by our talented team. With BracketCS, we plan to create other opportunities to help students improve their computer science fluency, including heuristic contests, USACO Mocks, hackathons, and many more!

I am proud to announce that our second-ever contest had 855 registered participants and 472 registered teams from 77 countries around the world this past week, with over 30 problems across our three divisions: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced. I would like to thank everyone who participated in our contest, and I congratulate each and every one of you for completing the contest and working really hard to complete our problems. If you're still interested in learning about the solutions to the problems or upsolving the problems, please refer to our "Past Contests" page, which includes our problemset in a Codeforces Gym alongside editorial pages for all problems.

Without further ado, please join me in congratulating our winners:

Advanced

1. purplecrayon orz (Rohin Garg, Ritwin Narra, Benjamin Chen)
2. peepeepoopoo (James Sng, Jamie Lim, Yaw Chur Zhe)
3. What Will Kana Win? (Weiming Zhou, Bing-Dong Liu, Julian Wu)

Intermediate

1. cattle (Brendon Jiang, Shine Chang, Aaron Cu)
2. shubham911 (Shubham Gupta)
3. Bald Lols (Kaicheng Luo, Nathan Ye, Samuel Ren)

Novice

1. jocks wannabe programmers (James Li, Rob Smith)
2. radhyaBebek (Atila Ghulwani Altamis, Polikarpus Arya Pradhanika, Radhya Cahya Kusuma)
3. Plastic on IOI'24 (Muhammad Daniyal, Muhammad Saram)

If your team is listed as a winner, please DM any of the contest heads/organizers or email team@cerealcodes.org for your prize.

For everyone, please be on the lookout for our future projects with BracketCS (mentioned above), and I hope they can be enriching experiences in your computer science journey. If you want to buy CerealCodes shirts, please fill out this form. Also, please fill out this form to provide us with valuable contest feedback. Finally, if you're interested in applying to our team, please do so here.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the CerealCodes 2024 contest next year!

Jesse

• Founder and President of BracketCS

P.S. Feel free to message me at yorepi7 on Discord if you're interested in buying a CerealCodes shirt.