Throughout my short Competitive Programming journey one particular problem that I kept facing, which I think is the main reason of my slow progress is that despite sometimes getting the full ideas to a problem rather quickly, I would still spend 10 times longer trying implementing it until getting the test sample right let alone getting an AC.

I think this is a key factor why some newbies competitive programmer (including myself) progress poorly despite having some mathematical and algorithmic intuition (I am not claiming that I have such good intuition). They'll get burnt out implementing it properly and most of the times wasted their time that could have been used to advanced to another problems.

I believe that the skill of getting the key observation and actually implementing it right and clean are two different (yet not separated) skill. The question I want to ask for the more experienced competitive programmer are:

• Have you experienced similar case long time ago?

• If you have, do you have any tips on how to improve implementation?

• What to do if you cannot implement your solution after a long period of times? Should you move on?

Here is me trying to implement the solution for [problem:https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1294/problem/F] for hours after getting the the full ideas similar to the editorial.

Source: 211724504

Pain.

I had a brief conversation with stevenwjy and fonmagnus some days ago regarding whether algorithms used in Competitive Programming are commonly used, or at all used in industries. Their respond were, if I remember correctly and I wish I am not misquoting them, “Mostly not used at all and for some algorithms might be best suit in certain industries meaning you might need to use segment tree in trading (?) but not software engineering.” And I understand their respond, in industry, the challenges are different from competitive programming thus requiring different techniques and approaches to solve them.

Looking at machine learning for example, I see that most of the algorithms and data structure used in CP are absent, and the algorithm/technique that are used in ML like Gradient Descent and Linear Regression is not used in CP at all. Even if Dynamic Programming is used, it is slightly different than what we use in CP. I initially felt devastated at first but at the end I understood that they are totally two different fields requiring different experties.

However I am not sure with the other fields in computer science. Which field do you think has the most similarity with CP? Can you mention where each cp techniques are used in other fields?

I am not by any mean trying to say that competitive programming is useless like some people out there. Certainly it has it own merits specifically in building intuition and improving problem solving skill which certainly help in solving real world problems.

It come to my attention that some submissions has a single line of code somewhat like:

if(t == 1000) cout << "HACK IT" << endl;

that was purposely added so that someone could hack it. Some of these are fairly obvious, take a look at these submission made by a same user and are hacked by a same user: 198836228, 198832711, 198836228, 198836778, 198838662.

What are these supposed to mean?

I am not sure if this is a bug, but for a competition that will open for regis pretty much soon, It is kinda weird that they would not allow you to register you team until next year. It said the following in the website: or is this supposed to be intentional?