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Guendabiaani's blog

By Guendabiaani, history, 4 years ago, In English

A couple days ago a most dearest friend told me to participate in his cf round, this instantly reminded me about my embarrassing blog history where I made a plan to get to candidate master and bailed quickly after.

To right this wrong, I come before you today with a more ambitious plan, which is making master in 3 months.

If you have read up to this point, that means you are at least mildly interested in this grandiose journey, and so you probably have a few questions. Fear not, I have prepared a list of FAQ for your convenience.

FAQ

  • Why?

Solving problems is pretty fun, however, having your name stained with a boring blue is not. This journey is aesthetically motivated.

  • How?

Last time my plan was not very simple and choosing the problems was time consuming, I think that contributed to its failure. Furthermore, I don't think master is an unreasonable goal (as in, I believe anyone can get it given enough practice). Therefore, in the interest of success I will just be solving problems rated >= 1900 in CF by order of solves.

  • When?

I actually started today, the first such problem is called 'Dijkstra?'. I don't know if I already knew this, the problem itself (finding a shortest path in a graph with positive weights) is not very difficult, but I realized I don't know much theory so I'll also be reading the handbook for learning theory or good implementations of things.

  • How? (Revisited)

Solve problems rated >= 1900 in CF by order of solves, as well as the Handbook ( https://cses.fi/problemset/ ) to learn about more classical problems.

  • Frequency?

I'm sure about very few things in life, but I know for sure that writing blogs is boring and time consuming, and that I like attention. Striving for a balance between this two things, I will post updates approximately every month, this will allow me to use most of the time solving problems, and it also has the added bonus of letting me quietly disappear if things go sideways.

Having said all that, I salute everyone single one of you that read up to this point and is also pursuing more visually pleasing colors. I will see you in a month.

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By Guendabiaani, history, 5 years ago, In English

This has not gone too well for the last week because I had several midterms, but hopefully I'll make up for it this week. Whenever I had time I tried simple brute force/meet in the middle problems.

515B - Drazil and His Happy Friends

Idea

1249C2 - Good Numbers (hard version)

Idea

1043D - Mysterious Crime

Idea

888E - Maximum Subsequence

Idea

769D - k-Interesting Pairs Of Integers

Idea

As for the plan I decided I will now mostly focus on solving harder problems since speed doesn't seem to matter that much at this level. For the basic techniques section that I need to practice DP, Two pointers, Range queries and Bit manipulation which I am not very familiar with.

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By Guendabiaani, history, 5 years ago, In English

I didn't solve any problems from the list because there were two contests and I didn't want to get too tired. Here is my experience with each of them:

Educational Round 85
Codejam 2020 Round 1A

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By Guendabiaani, history, 5 years ago, In English

Here are today's problems. I'm pretty excited about tomorrow because of the edu round and the first codejam.

'Data structures':

1006C - Three Parts of the Array

600B - Queries about less or equal elements

1214C - Bad Sequence

701B - Cells Not Under Attack

1104B - Game with string

Solution

Brute force:

23A - You're Given a String...

645A - Amity Assessment

1184A1 - Heidi Learns Hashing (Easy)

88A - Chord

593A - 2Char

Sorting:

1197C - Array Splitting

Solution

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By Guendabiaani, history, 5 years ago, In English

Today I participated in the Div.2 Round 632 and solved all the 1200 level problems of sorting and binary search from my list. I will write the main takeaways for self reference.

Div. 2 Round 632:

Contest experience

Sorting:

492B - Vanya and Lanterns

Solution

519B - A and B and Compilation Errors

Solution

456A - Laptops

Solution

1294B - Collecting Packages

Solution

977C - Less or Equal

Solution

Binary Search:

755B - PolandBall and Game

Solution

911B - Two Cakes

Solution

1260B - Obtain Two Zeroes

Solution

743B - Chloe and the sequence

Solution

1221C - Perfect Team

Solution

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By Guendabiaani, history, 5 years ago, In English

My plan is to go through each chapter of the competitive programmer's handbook and practice each topic with the codeforces problemset. I am focusing on five difficulty levels: 1200,1400,1600,1800,2000. My study plan is to keep a sorted list of problems with the information (difficulty, date added) and adding 25 problems about each topic I finish reading, 5 from each difficulty level and solving the smallest one available at each time.

This is a silly way to store the problems, but I feel it may actually do a good job letting me build up experience with each topic through easy problems while still prioritizing the most recently studied chapter if I don't fall behind too much.

I will use this blog for accountability starting tomorrow: writing comments about the most interesting problems I solve each day, as well as the readings I do :)

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