You may all be aware that North Korean competitors are very successful in Codechef contests, particularly in the monthly Long Contests. Both @kgcstar and @kutengine won the monthly long contests several times. Personally, I have never been able to rank higher than any of the two in any contest that I participated (always because they obtained a better score than mine in the challenge problem). Although I don't enjoy "not winning" :) I did enjoy reading the code of their challenge problem submissions and I even learnt a thing or two from their winning challenge problem submissions :) , so there was something good in this for me, too. Sometimes, after seeing many different strategies implemented in their code, I concluded that I would have never had the time to try out so many things in a 10-day contest and that they definitely deserved to win at least for the amount of effort they put into their challenge problem submissions (trying out many strategies with various parameters, etc.).
However, yesterday, in a Codeforces thread discussing the recent ACM ICPC World Finals, someone posted a link to an article mentioning the good results of the North Korean teams in the Codechef contests (they were mostly talking about June, July, August, September and October 2013, where @kutengine and @kgcstar obtained really good results). The article was in Russian, so I used Google Translate to read it in English. The word team was mentioned every time, but I thought that maybe the translation was bad (they also mentioned team ACRush several times :) ) or that maybe the writer of the article wasn't aware that Codechef contests are not team-based contests, but rather individual-based contests.
Nevertheless, I was intrigued by this and searched on Google a bit more. I found several other articles mentioning that the teams from the North Korean universities won the Codechef contests. I discarded this again because i thought that maybe the writer of the article wasn't aware that Codechef contests are not team contests.
But then I came across this article which specifically mentions that a group of four students from Kimchaek University of Technology won the June 2013 Codechef long contest (the winner of that contest was @kutengine).
Later I found out that a team named kutengine participated in IPSC 2013 (see here). And a team named kgcstar participated in a 2013 ACM Asia regional contest (see here).
So this makes me wonder. Are @kutengine and @kgcstar individuals participating in Codechef contests or teams of several people?
Note that I am not questioning the quality of their submissions in Codechef contests - those submissions were clearly good and based on those submissions they clearly deserved to win (when they indeed won). However, at least for the challenge problem, having a team of people working on it definitely makes it easier to win than being just a single individual.
I would like to ask the North Korean competitors to clarify this issue, if they can.