After 2 months of hard practice, I finally managed to climb from gray to specialist! I knew this moment would come soon, but I didn't expect to perform so well out of the blue — I unexpectedly took 721st place in todays Div. 2. Overall, I feel like I'm making big steps and rapidly learning — I used to get stuck on Div. 2 A and B before, sometimes even failing to solve B, but now I'm able to solve A-D. It's starting to get easier to notice patterns and break down problems to solve them with already known algorithms. I'm looking forward to seeing how far I can go!
I would say 'til the next contest, but I probably won't post until I reach expert. So, hopefully I'll write again soon!
If you start gooning, you will make it to expert soon, give it a try!
Now it’s time to celebrate with a nice, long, edging sesh
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Hey, I think it's a mix of both. I started going up when I revisited 'easy' concepts that I thought I had learned and solved hard problems that utilized them, which helped me to apply them more often in contests. For some problems, I just look at them and immediately recognize that I solved something similar with some arbitrary algorithm, so I can get to the solution much faster. But it's also important to learn new things, because certain problems are super difficult unless you learn the specific algorithm to solve it, such as segment trees with lazy propagation.
For Div. 2 B, a lot of the time it feels like you just have to notice some key detail about the problem to solve it. I believe that this just requires some intuition, which you build up when you solve problems that are difficult for you.
And most importantly, just keep participating in contests! They really help in determining your progress and what you need to work on. I would recommend trying out different websites too, such as AtCoder, because they offer somewhat different types of problems + you can participate more often. (Although I wish the editorials there didn't take 100 million years to get uploaded)
Hope this helps out a bit. Good luck!
Congrats! I also re-achieved specialist after tanking to newbie!
Congrats
I also got specialist after that contest :)
:)
How do you select problems to practice? What to do when get stuck in a problem? And where do you practice bar codeforce?
Usually I pick a topic I want to practice and look for problems with increasing difficulty involving that topic. If I get stuck on a problem for around 30 mins with no significant progress, I check the editorial and try to understand why the solution works, then implement the solution myself. I feel like this saves a lot time while also providing around the same result as spending 4 hours to solve it.
For practice, I usually just participate in many contests and look at the editorials for problems that I couldn't solve. I also really like the Leetcode daily problems, especially hard ones, because they test a random topic. Though sometimes the problems are super trivial, so I just look at a road map for more or search by filter for some topic I want to practice.
What happened in today's edu round man
Bro is getting back to pupil
I kind of didn't read the problem statement correctly like 4 times and was solving something else completely for a while. By the time I kind of understood the concept at like 1:30, I already had a lot of useless code that was tripping me up and I was feeling really bummed out, so at that point it was just basically angrily typing something and hoping it works. So now I'm gonna have to lock in tomorrow to get back to specialist.