Killever's blog

It's Obvious !!!
By Killever, 10 years ago, In English

First Thanks for every one spend time to prepare an contests to us I really Appreciate that.
Tutorials here are very weak comparable with Topcoder (vexorian make his best to make every thing as simple as possible).
Really most of tutorials here need another tutorials to explain it
The weird thing I noticed is when writer write a tutorial for his problemset write this sentence.
It's Obvious... , It's Easy to notice... , and something like that.
when you see this phrase almost he will tell us something neither Obvious nor understandable to us some of writers write something like that , It's obvious that this problem has an optimal subproblems so dp will work :) (Really THANKS for your neat explanation :) )
If it's obvious to me why then I'm reading this tutorial now ?
goto google & write "it's obvious codeforces" or click here you will see a good results.
Thanks & hope you got my words in a right way

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10 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +27 Vote: I do not like it

very humble nickname you have

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10 years ago, # |
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Sometimes, it's better not to write everything in too much detail. It's common for things to not be obvious to someone who hasn't encountered a similar "subproblem" before or didn't think about the problem a lot, but it gives you room to solve these "subproblems" yourself instead of only finding out the whole solution.

When I read editorials, I always just read it very briefly to get a rough idea of the intended solution. I just find it easier to think about a solution afterwards, basing my own thoughts on what I remember from that brief reading, than to read properly and try to understand what the editorialist meant exactly.

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    So you think CF editorials can't be improved?

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      10 years ago, # ^ |
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      To be honest, I don't know for sure what's a "better" choice (as in, which choice leads to gaining better results given an equal, long amount of time), so I don't try to talk about that — instead, I'm providing an alternative method of squeezing out as much use as possible from a seemingly bad situation.

      Yes, CF editorials are often too short to explain solutions well. But this is where my fairly unique thinking is seen: people are usually asking "can it be improved?", while I'm usually asking myself "can I improve thanks to it?" :D

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        10 years ago, # ^ |
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        Maybe some volunteers can offer themselves to write alternative editorials, with the accompanying intention of practicing their English skills. That's an interesting proposition to any non-native English speaker out there=).

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10 years ago, # |
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It is far more wide phenomenon.

There was a book "Joking Physicists" (if I remember correctly) which gave small list of such famous phrases and their real meaning. It goes like this:

  • It's obvious — really, we do not know how to prove it, but it looks so;
  • Even a fool can see — the explanation of the given fact is so whimsical and we could not reproduce it without making many mistakes;
  • It's well-known fact — we think we read of it in some very special article but now we could not find this article and probably it is just a "false memory";
  • It was shown by experiment — well, it was not shown — we never succeed in this experiment, but theoretically, probably, it should be so anyway.

However, editorials are usually written by authors of contests and I think you could not at once force them do this better. Probably even not many of them will read your request... :)

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10 years ago, # |
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goto google & write "it's obvious codeforces"

when i tried it, the first result was this very blog post :D

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    Actually I don't know what happen to google results it seems that this post affect on all results of google before I write this post the first page of results display tutorials of codeforces that contains it's obvious phrase.
    weird

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      10 years ago, # ^ |
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      Actually I don't know what happen to google results

      There is a small bug with indexing pages of CF since all pages include "recent actions" panel and do not hint google this content should not be regarded too much. This leads to pollution of many pages with keywords from these links.

      I think this could be fixed by using googleoff / googleon comments around this block, but I'm not sure CF developers will put attention to this problem soon :)

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10 years ago, # |
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Is it seem like?

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