What better moment to post my first blog other than now! After 3 to 4 months of practicing problems and learning new stuff I'm finally a specialist now. Its a really happy moment for me, and I am enjoying it right now. But soon I will have to get to work to retain this rank.
What topics should I learn next to improve my skills? I am open to all suggestions and advice.
Cheers.
That's great, congratulations!! I am too trying to become blue on CF in a couple of months (at least that's my target)
What are the topics U have mastered in this 3 months? Also, Give me some advice on how to improve.
I have done bit manipulations, number theory and combinatorics topics, greedy algorithms and binary search. Aside from that I also have done a bit of some advanced topics since they were included in the course I was following like segment trees and fenwick trees, but they are not really useful right now. Id say pick a rating range in which you find problems to be challenging but not unsolvable, and solve problems from there. Once you get used to the level of problems, increase the level of problems by say 100. That would be my advice as I also do the same.
Wow, your progress in just four months is impressive! Can you share some insights into how you managed to cover all those topics so quickly? I'm particularly curious about your study routine and any tips you might have for efficient learning. Thanks in advance for sharing your experience!
I followed a udemy course which I would say is pretty good. I got the basics clear through it. Soon enough it moved on to more difficult topics which I doubt I would need currently, so I stopped it for the while and focused on solving problems. Normally I spend about 1 to 2 hours in cp. But between the times of ZCO and INOI, I spent most of my time doing cp, say about 6 hours a day. I didn't solve too many problems topic wise. My practice mainly comes from solving random problems. Also if you haven't, I'd suggest turning off tags when problem solving as they are a big hint. This is what I did and this is what you can also do.
The link to the course it https://www.udemy.com/course/competitive-programming-algorithms-coding-minutes/?couponCode=KEEPLEARNING
Congrats!
Even though I am not a blue or something higher, I have been gathering some knowledge and I will tell you what I have discovered.
There are two aspects of Codeforces contests.
1) Skill: This can be knowledge and experience. For improving, I think it isn't the most important thing to learn more but rather to get better at topics such as the greedy algorithm and DP. Games are also frequent on Codeforces, so if you aren't too good at games, that is a thing worth looking at.
2) Speed: Of course, you may be like "I should focus on actually solving the problems instead of solving them quicker", which is right, but speed can change your ranking in the contest. Codeforces updates your rating based on placement, not number of problems solved. If you practice solving problems quicker, it can be the difference for a lot of rating. As an example, on one contest, my friend had solved 1 more problem than me, but since I solved the problems really quickly, I got only about 200 places lower than my friend.
Final tip: I think making a code template is good because that can save typing time. For example, making an input function to input a vector can save time, especially for problem A. I also like having
to prevent integer overflow. I naturally type int, so I won't have to worry about 10^18 numbers.
Good luck to you and to anyone reading this. Hope we all achieve better rating!
Wow, awesome progress for 3-4 months!
Thank you! :D
Maybe Segment tree is useful.
I have done a bit on this topic but have not solved many problems yet. Now that you mention it i guess it is time to do so.
why'd u give Jotaro a beard?
Idk it looked funny
Specialist is a start point of the journey.Not only in the past, but also now.
orz reaching specialist in such a short time
I took a pretty long time as you can see from my graph :')
Learn matroid intersection, a great quick way to become red!