naivedyam's blog

By naivedyam, history, 5 months ago, In English

In last Edu Div2 round 12000ish people solved 3 problems. Today's Div 2, 8000ish people solved 3. What has happened all of a sudden since last 2 contests? My rank is going extremely down even after improving earlier I used to get positive change even after solving 2 problems. I have seen profiles of people getting positive change in specialist range after solving 2 div 2s in a contest getting ranks under 3k. But since past 2 contests it seems impossible for even a pupil to get a positive change after solving 3. I solved 3 problems today but could only get 6460 rank at the end.

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5 months ago, # |
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last edu first 3 questions were easy compared to previous the differentiating question was d

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5 months ago, # |
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cheating...

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5 months ago, # |
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People don't become smarter but become cheater

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5 months ago, # |
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bro there's tons of notorious people out there who just want to get fake sense of satisfaction; less they know that all you will have at the end is your knowledge and your mindset and not any website's or platform ratings and ranking. Yes, I absolutely agree that these bastards should be punished extremely. But this internet things have a tons of restrictions and less to no way to stop cheaters by 100%:( . I earlier used to participate a lot on hackerrank it got spoiled by cheaters, then I used codechef, is rotten by cheater on youtube and telegram, now we see same on codeforces. I believe the best we can do as of now is to keep doing our work and not to look into all these stuff regarding rating and rankings.....

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    As i know only in India hr using these sites to measure skill of coders for company. Not projects, previous experience and etc.. So it's only problem in India for now.

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5 months ago, # |
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People aren't getting too smart, they just tend to act like the one and end up cheating with their future........Cz cheating will not help them in the long run.

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5 months ago, # |
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They are cheaters;but i would say the questions were relatively easier also

although I was not able to solve all of them :(

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5 months ago, # |
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The problem arises during the hacking phase of a programming contest, where participants can view others' submissions. Some individuals exploit this by copying the solutions and sharing them on platforms like YouTube and Telegram. This practice undermines the integrity of the contest and devalues the efforts of genuine problem solvers. To address this, contest organizers need to implement stricter security measures and encourage ethical behavior among participants.

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    Bro you are saying correct their are many youtube channels,telegram and discord server also

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5 months ago, # |
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I find it funny how all but 1 of previous comments blame cheaters.

I personally agree with grindingManiacally, it's probably that problems were simply easier than usual. Today's C was easier than a regular C, and that's why it got more solves.

And you can indeed get a good performance in today's round with just A-C. However, you have to work on your speed of implementation and on coming up with (and proving) your solutions. That comes with practice.

I said this before, but this seems like a great opportunity to say it again. Your performance in contests depends on you and only you. Mindset such as "I would have gotten positive delta if there were no cheaters. I hate cheaters." is not the right one. Mindsets such as "I would have gotten positive delta if I didn't mess up implementation of C. I should practice my implementation." is.

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    True it's always easy to dodge accountability

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    You got at least one part wrong: proving is entirety optional during a round, and I would even argue that on average it's worse to try and prove something during the round. After the contest is over though it's useful to try and prove something, or at least look up a ready proof.

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      What I believe on the proving part is it depends on how much you are believing your intuition during contest which basically comes when you tackle more and more problems of the same type or you are good at the "of-course part".

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      In most cases, proving is the same thing as solving. IMO you can't really come up with a complicated algorithm without simultaneously gaining understanding why it works. The exception here are some "easy" problems where some conditions really can be guessed, like that problem where answer is YES if $$$a_1 < a_n$$$. (In my opinion, these problems are bad and shouldn't appear in a contest, especially in Div. 2 A-C.) But in my experience, such things come up rarely in hard problems.

      Also it's worth pointing out that when people talk about proving in contexts like this, they don't mean writing down a mathematically rigorous formal proof. Some school curricula have created this idea that proving is all about using special phrases, two columns and whatnot. That's not really the case. At its core, a proof is just a chain of reasoning. The formalities are important when writing stuff down to make sure everything can only be understood in one way. But in a programming contest, these formalities don't matter. What matters is that you know how to prove it.

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        5 months ago, # ^ |
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        You mention chain of reasoning and knowing how to prove something, and I guess (no pun intended) that is what constitutes a skill gap between CP'ers (unless you're getting knowledge checked, then it's an experience gap). But I also side with tfg when it comes to guessing ideas and solutions to problems.

        Some recent problems that could have been guessed completely, or I guessed during a contest:

        Spoiler

        I couldn't immediately conclude that it's correct, but I also didn't see any other way to solve the problem, so I just had to roll with it

        • 1989D - Smithing Skill I couldn't even prove the amortized bound of my solution during the contest (skill issue)

        • 1985G - D-Function Looked like a nasty math problem, yet when I made an assumption that carries in multiplication are bad, everything fell into place

        • 1983D - Swap Dilemma This is like the pinnacle of guessing. Either you know about the parity of a permutation, you google it during the round, or you have to wing it and make a guess

        I wanted to include more problems, but I felt like I was getting away from the point. Also yes, I acknowledge that these problems are "easy", expert (or CM) level at most.

        When it comes to proving and guessing, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. If you are foolish enough to take leaps of faith in your reasoning and rely on your guesses, as well as courageous enough to try things that seemingly are implausible, I think on average a person is going to solve more problems.

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          4 months ago, # ^ |
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          You've read into my opinion perfectly. May I ask why me specifically? lol

          A bit about difficulty and proofs: guessing and proofs aren't mutually exclusive. I recall multiple times that I've guessed the solution and then it is a matter of whether it is worth trying to prove it or not. I can't completely disregard my habits of trying to prove everything so I usually end up proving the solution for easy problems but if it takes 5+ minutes then it starts seeming not worth it unless something from the proof seems necessary in order to code the solution.

          I think -is-this-fft- would push back on my opinion saying "if you've proved it then you haven't guessed" but I think the path to reach a thought is also important. If you simply jump directly to the solution and then try to confirm it instead of doing small steps that take you closer to the solution (my preferred way of solving things) then it was a guess that took you to the solution, even if you confirm it. Depending on how that guess came to be, I'd call it a wild guess (nothing from past problems would make you think of doing that guess) or not (for similar problems there are similarities in the solution so it's completely fair to just try everything you recall from past similar problems). Especially due to the format allowing getting a couple of WA without costing that much (and trends of people downvoting announcements whenever the systest is significantly different from pretests), proving turns optional.

          About fft's comment of gaining understanding of the problem, it also doesn't mean that you won't guess. The most extreme example in the recent rounds that I've taken part of is https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1965/problem/C which I knew that "sometimes you can fold stuff in order to remove equal adjacent characters" and "in the end we have a binary string and we're moving left/right on it" but it took me a while to guess that the final strip wouldn't have equal adjacent characters. Someone asked me in private about the problem and I didn't manage to prove it after trying quite a bit and I'd suggest you to try doing it, it's surprisingly difficult. I'd say that I had a good understanding of the process from that problem but in order to gain such a specific observation and being able to prove it, you need something that is closer to divine intervention than just building understanding.

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            4 months ago, # ^ |
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            why me specifically?

            Because you are my goat orz

            And the NEVER FORGET TO commented section of your submissions is great. I'm definitely stealing it, I also might just print it out and hang it on the wall above my desk.

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            4 months ago, # ^ |
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            I think -is-this-fft- would push back on my opinion saying "if you've proved it then you haven't guessed" but I think the path to reach a thought is also important.

            No, I won't argue with that. But that is quite far from the statement I responded to.

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      Never proving an idea before coding is just like you do a gacha game every single round. At that point, your rating would be straight-up invalidated, as it had been portraying nothing but your gacha luck.

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    Yeah, agreed! Today i was on the right track solving problem B, it was just that i was missing one case(what to do when evenNum > maxOddNum), but later i screwed up with my approach and went off the track resulting i could not able to implement it correctly.
    AC solution: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1993/submission/274434197
    WA solution: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1993/submission/274391159

    Most of the time it happens to me, i come up with an approach to the problem but could not implement it correctly and at last I've to either see the tutorials or leave that question.

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I have also observed the same thing. When I first started my cp in late December last year, I saw people get pupil rank by only solving div2 B. But after 3-4 months, I am seeing div2 C solve count surpass 10k frequently. Since then I was asking myself the same question am I becoming dumb or people becoming smart.

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People keep forgetting how many participants we have these days. If you're talking about only these two contests, then yes, they are just not too hard as a 2C (especially the educational one). But "getting too easy" is not the right way to describe it. You can't simply say "we have 8k solves (well, it's less than 7k now due to many FSTs) compared to 4k in old days so it's as twice as easier". No, in these old days the number of participants were like 20k, 10k, or even less, not 37k participants like today. The number of solves on 2C has always been around 1/3 of the number of solves on 2A on 6-problem sets, and it's still not far from today's round.

Also, I tried some uphacking on C and I hacked 23 solutions within 3 pages, so theoretically there would've been 1000+ more FSTs if the system test had been stronger. It's just that many solutions that should not pass (like many many naive $$$\mathcal{O}(n^2)$$$ or $$$\mathcal{O}(nk)$$$ solutions) passed due to weak tests.

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4 months ago, # |
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It is recommended to have a brown name system like Luogu

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4 months ago, # |
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stfu bro... even u r doing cheating ..look at ur skipped solns

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4 months ago, # |
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Usli su u gas bajo!!!