Every contest, brave souls gather for battle. They open their editors, pour another cup of coffee, and whisper: “This time, no stupid bugs.” The compiler laughs.

Meet your inevitable enemies.

1. WA — Wrong Answer, but spiritually correct

WA is that polite “no” you get from the universe. Your code runs fine, outputs look perfect… and then: Wrong answer on test 2.

Everyone gets WA2. It’s tradition. Test 1 is the decoy — small, friendly, there just to boost your ego. Test 2 is where the problemsetter hides the bodies.

You patch it. Resubmit. Wrong answer on test 4. At this point, you’re no longer debugging — you’re performing an exorcism.

WA is the most human of all verdicts. It means you almost understood.

2. RE — Runtime Error, death without explanation

RE doesn’t even give you a reason. It just collapses in silence.

Segfault? Stack overflow? Accessed a[n] again? Who knows. Locally it works, on Codeforces it implodes.

You try to replicate the crash. It disappears. You add asserts, print half the array, stare at your screen like a war veteran.

RE is your program’s way of saying: “I loved you, but I couldn’t go on like this.”

3. TLE — Time Limit Exceeded, the slow death

TLE is patient. It watches your O(n²) masterpiece march straight into a 3-second wall.

You try everything:

• Faster I/O
• Move one line out of the loop
• Forgot to flush in interactive — again

But no. The timer ticks, the judge waits, and your loop keeps looping.

TLE doesn’t hate you — it just wants you to think in logarithms.

4. MLE — Memory Limit Exceeded, the hoarder’s curse

MLE is that quiet one you forget about until it eats your RAM.

You thought storing a few arrays was fine. Now you’ve got three 2D vectors, a recursive DFS, and a global map of maps.

The system whispers: “Memory limit exceeded.”

You check your usage: 256 MB. You check your code: you created a vector<vector<int>> of size n². MLE nods gently, as if saying, “Maybe don’t.”

It’s not the worst way to go. Just… embarrassing.

Epilogue

You tell yourself it’s fine. You’ve learned. And next contest, you’ll be back — wiser, calmer, still debugging at 2AM.

Because in the end, Codeforces isn’t about beating others. It’s about surviving all four horsemen — and earning that one line of Accepted.