February 19, 2021 SRM 800 – A Memorable Milestone!

SRM 800 was held last weekend, and as the number of the SRM suggests, it was not a normal SRM, but a special one for the community. And we made sure to do our part in making it memorable. 

The event had members competing, of course, but also included a panel of the greats, lots of prizes and t-shirts and an interesting post-match analysis session.

The event started with me getting the opportunity to flag off the milestone event. Throughout the day, I kept thinking about how much effort has gone into setting up these rounds. 800 SRMs, 20 TCOs, over 5600 problems. All thanks to everyone in the community who contributed to the growth of SRMs and kept making them interesting time and again for the last twenty years!

Kickoff and the Panel of the Greats

The event kickoff had me embracing these numbers and efforts and thanking everyone who has been a part of this journey. And what followed was something that kept this feeling engraved on my heart –  the panel of the greats with the best of the best, tourist, Petr, neal_wu and misof. The session was filled with their amazing stories, their strategies and a lot more. Do check out the recording if you missed it. Make sure to listen to the part where they mention their favorite SRMs. 

Following the panel we had VP of Community, Adam Morehead, explain what new things are happening at Topcoder, the most important being RDMs, our Development version of SRMs. If you are a competitive programmer and also like Development you should check them out. We are running a practice match to help you get started. Find out about RDMs here and compete in the practice match to be ready for the next match.

Later, I took time to share some basic information about how you can get started with SRMs at Topcoder and make sure you are an expert when we do this party.

The Round

What followed was a round with an interesting touch. misof came up with the idea to have one more problem for everyone, so A round had four problems in each division, giving everyone more to solve. The experiment turned out to be pretty great as we saw more than 80% of members in both divisions with a positive score.

misof and laoriu wrote the problems for the round and majk tested them:

We saw two of our panelists take the top two spots. tourist easily ended up on the top with an amazing 300 point lead over neal_wu who took the runner up spot.

The round was followed by a post-match analysis session where all the greats came back to explain the solutions to the members.

Prizes and Winners

$750 in cash and 100 T-shirts were given out to the members as a part of the round. 

Check out the list of winners and make sure to congratulate them.

Here’s the exclusive SRM 800 T-shirt we gave out. 

Post-Match Analysis

For the post-match analysis, lg5293, our veteran problem writer and host of the TCO Algorithm show, joined the greats to discuss the problems. Take a look here at their approaches to the problem statements.

Missed SRM 800?  Don’t worry – you can stay abreast of the upcoming rounds with the Topcoder Public Events Calendar here. 

Here are some quick links for everything related to SRM 800:

• The Panel of the Greats
• Getting Started with SRMs – Deck
• Post Match Analysis
• SRM 800 Results
• SRM 800 Editorials 

We hope to see you compete in SRM 801 and many more rounds coming up.