It came to a surprise of many that the winner of the first closing stage (Stage #8) turns out to be Indonesia. In our previous news article we presented the table of the top 5, and Indonesia ranked fourth at the time. But everyone was looking at the big countries such as USA, Germany, or Australia. In an interesting turn of events, Indonesia came out victorious with a not-so small lead of 3 seconds over Australia, and 5 seconds over Romania.

The biggest victim of the final (sandbag)-stretch seems to be the USA. The team fell back from first place to fifth, but due to the point algorithm only lost 8 points overall. The rest of the Country Cup is coming up rather quickly now, with the next three stages closing in less than three days! The USA is leading in two of those, but might see heavy fire from Indonesia and Australia. Noteworthy is the performance of France this year. They came in sixth in the SuperPI 32M stage, are currently leading in Stage 5, and runner-up in stage 6. The next stages are going to be more important. Not only the points for the winners increase, but also the slope of the point algorithm increases. This means that losing a spot will cause you to lose more points than in the previous stage.

Rank	Country		Time
#1		Indonesia	8min 11sec 830ms
#2		Australia	8min 14sec 690ms
#3		Romania	8min 16sec 980ms
#4		Germany	8min 17sec 320ms
#5		United States	8min 17sec 590ms
#6		France	8min 28sec 270ms
#7		Poland	8min 42sec 210ms
#8		Belgium	8min 46sec 640ms
#9		Sweden	8min 55sec 360ms
#10		United Kingdom	9min 13sec 610ms

In any case, congratulations to Indonesia especially but also Australia and Romania for finishing in the top-3 of Stage 8. Good luck in the next stages!

(PS: with 1,500 submissions and nearly 400 participants, this year’s Country Cup is the largest competition we’ve ever hosted!)

Here are some system pictures of the winning team!