TCO17 Marathon Finalists Selected

The Warsaw Lightning Marathon Match finalized the list of advancers for TCO17 Marathon onsite competition. wleite has made a list of the top-12 that goes to Buffalo and posted it here. He also made a statistics with number of marathon finals per participant here.
jmpld40 provided an official list of the lucky ones who will compete for the title of TCO Marathon Champion on October 22, 2017. It matches the data calculated by wleite and is sorted by TCO points: PaulJefferys, Psyho, CatalinT, blackmath, tomerun, wleite, nhzp339, chokudai, ainu7, Milanin, mugurelionut and marek.cygan.
The only possible swap as a result of the Lightning round, were Mojito1 and marek.cygan. For this to happen, Mojito1 had to finish 1st and marek.cygan to be out of top-10. This did not happen.

Testing Servers Change

This was the third time final tests were run on the c3 virtual machines. It did not go that smooth, as it turned out that some servers were still running the old m3 instances. This led to exceeding the time limits on part of the testcases for some participants.
The issue affected mostly C++ competitors using rdtsc assembly instruction to measure time who assumed 2.8 GHz frequency of the CPU. We do not have an official and consistent way of handling time in C++ now, so the important recommendation for rdtsc users is to continue checking the CPU frequency during the example tests and following the latest news on the issue. Another approach is to use gettimeofday.

The Results

The 0-scores that were result of timeouts, were rejudjed. The official winner of the match is nika, who also was a leader before the system tests. wleite and kurenai3110 round up the top-3 and get the prize.
The onsite winners were announced during the awards ceremony in Warsaw. They are, in order: marek.cygan, Mojito1 and 7ania7.

The Task

The puzzle was prepared by Nickolas and was a good choice for 3 day long match. Longer duration would have made it a battle of performance tuning, mainly because Simulated Annealing is not a secret technique anymore.
Check the forums for what top finishers say about their solutions.

What Next?

There will be an introductory Marathon put by Nickolas during the Educational Week for Algorithm and Marathon (September 18-25). It is intended mostly for newcomers and will have a relaxed rules. For instance, discussing what is generally forbidden to discuss in the forums will be allowed this time. The match will not be rated.
After that, there is going to be a regular Marathon Match 95, with a duration of 1 week.