DuongForeverAlone's blog

By DuongForeverAlone, history, 5 months ago, In English

When we come to CP, what is our goal overall? Some people could say that they want to improve their skill in solving problems and enhance their algorithm, some could say they aim to achieve better achievements in official CP competitions (ICPC, IOI...), or maybe some people just do it for fun. Each of us has our own ambition, but the similarity is that we want to come to CP in order to be better then ourself yesterday.

Recent days, I mean it has been one month since I know about the existence of cheating in CP, I had thought about it a lot. I usually attend CF and LC rounds, and I could find the comments about cheaters exist nearly in every round, which is a mess for me. Even right now, I could easily find a livestream in Youtube while the contest is running. I usually convince myself like: "That's okay, they couldn't go higher with those behaviours.", or: "That's okay, they could not go away from the system testing after the round", but in the long run it couldn't help much.

What is the goal of cheaters, we have already know about it, right? Higher opportunities in being employed by flexing a tremendous profile from an online platform is one of it (or I have to say that's a lot of it). Trying to find a job with a false information about the own coding skill is nothing than defraud a company. And personally this pisses me off, as this is not what a genuine coder should do, and it goes to far away from our initial noble ambition: improve ourself. At this point, I recall what Um_nik have said when it comes to "CP for jobs", which inspired me one year ago. Don't be misunderstanding here, I don't mean that doing CP won't have any affects in our career. It is supposed to help us a lot when we are in the actual work, not in our resume.

My another anxiety is that, maybe in some days, cheating will ruin any CP online platforms. We know that cheaters need to depend on someone to share the solutions, so the current level of the the one who shares solutions will decide the "game". Luckily right now, they are not too good to make the thing bad, but what will it be if a red, or even a black red coder does it instead? This is enough to be the end of online CP. And with the help of AI, plagiarism is hard to be detected and could make thing worse.

And they are what I want to say. To conclude, I'm pretty left helpless with cheaters, which I couldn't do much to prevent them (or I have to say I couldn't do anything). Although from now on I need to be more focus on training, I hope that the headquarters of any CP pages could take some steps in order to fight with those behaviours.

Finally, I want to hear your perspective about this.

P/S: I wrote the whole blog using my mobile phone, which takes me nearly 1 hour to finish. I mean, it's hard to sleep when thinking about this topic, maybe I'm too overthinking at this moment.

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By DuongForeverAlone, history, 13 months ago, In English

I tried to solve this problem: Optimal insertion using persistent segment tree. It gives me MLE for some reasons that I don't understand. Could anyone help me. My submission: Code

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By DuongForeverAlone, history, 15 months ago, In English

This is one of the problem in my college's site. It states that given a 2d matrix A, and I need to output the number of distinct elements of the compressed version of A (we called it matrix B). The compression progress satisfies those conditions:

  1. if A[i][j] == A[i][k] then B[i][j] == B[i][k]
  2. if A[i][j] < A[i][k] then B[i][j] < B[i][k]
  3. if A[i][j] == A[k][j] then B[i][j] == B[k][j]
  4. if A[i][j] < A[k][j] then B[i][j] < B[k][j]

For example, considered A = [[8, 11, 16], [16, 21, 16]] then we will have B = [[1, 2, 3], [3, 4, 3]] and the answer is 4. Note that we only have to output the number of distinct elements in B. I wonder is it possible to actually compress the array A, since it is possible to do it in an 1D matrix (or an array), or is there any trick to solve this problem without compressing?

I appreciate for every helps!

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