Find solution
How do you participate in the X-Factor?

Why do a lot of successful competitive programmers not participate actively on CodeChef but participate often on sites like TopCoder and Codeforces?

  • I've noticed quite a few competitive programmers, namely Petr Mitrichiev, Gennady Korotkevich, Neal Wu, Scott Wu, and a few others don't participate on CodeChef contests actively, but they participate in TC and CF pretty often. Why is this?

  • Answer:

    Codechef is an Indian website. It has got a large user base in India. Its very popular among programmers in India. Codechef has started getting large number of users from outside India recently. All the top programmers that you named joined Codechef quite late. They have been on TC and CF since a long time and must be very used to it. So I am guessing that may be one of the reasons. Secondly, all these top competitive programmers have other things to keep them busy too. E.g. Petr works at Google and helps them set questions for Google Codejam and organize it well too. I'm pretty sure even others must be involved in similar activities. So they might not find time to participate in activities on all such websites. And since TC and CF has got a much broader user base there is no reason why top competitive programmers shouldn't prefer them over Codechef.

Tarun Atrey at Quora Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

1. Codechef is an Indian website and userbase comprises mostly Indians. 2. Long contests take up more time of yours than a single TC or CF contest. 3. Honestly, short contests are disasters most of the time with laggy and unresponsive servers. No wonder if someone gets easily frustrated with it. UPD: Short Contests now are much smoother which invalidates point 3.

Nimesh Ghelani

Indian Contest. The world has a very bad impression about Indians in algorithmic contests. Directii hasn't taken as much initiative to popularize it globally as much it has done in Indian Universities Codechef came to the front with long contests . But now they have short contests too. They use spoj in the backend.Short contests on spoj with lots of participants may not give as a good user experience due to delay and waiting queue. PS: AFAIK Petr and Gennady has definitely participated in Codechef

Ishan Dutta

Related Q & A:

Just Added Q & A:

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.