ErdemFurkan's blog

OI Style contests in CodeForces
By ErdemFurkan, history, 4 months ago, In English

I think there is a big OI community in Codeforces. At least a few OI style competitions can be prepared in every year or month. There is already scoring section in polygon. We can make interactive problems as like WEOI mirror in polygon. I think there are people other than me who want OI style contests on Codeforces.

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4 months ago, # |
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CF is typically used as an ICPC platform. So it is out of route.

However, it can be enjoyable.

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    4 months ago, # ^ |
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    I believe CF has become a very big community now and is used for OI style contests in gyms widely. I can't see why CF cannot become a platform for all kinds of competitive programming related competitions and content.

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4 months ago, # |
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Can confirm. I started doing CF because I was practicing for OI.

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4 months ago, # |
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I hope this blog won't lose traction since I think this can give birth to a great discussion and hopefully some results.

I think a main issue as far as OI goes is that each national Olympiad has its different style and it is often hard for people from various countries to relate to each other's efforts in a relevant way, except for elite international competitions such as IOI, APIO, CEOI, EJOI or other similar ones just as prestigious, and even those have their own styles.

Personally, I think that in order to have regular OI competitions with international participants, we need to organize ourselves in such a way to have a contest calendar where OI enthusiasts can add their national Olympiads and wherever possible, links to mirrors or past problem archives.

With the existent OI contests, if we organize ourselves well, we can cover most of the year with contests which already take place and volunteers who set their own OI styled contests can also be organized, given a proper coordination and problem setting experience. (disclaimer: I already do that in Romania as I encourage people to develop their problem setting abilities and we end up organizing semi regular contests, you can check our past problems here).

Codeforces can be a good place for us to host these competitions and to maybe also compile a list of online judges which have various OI problems (usaco guide has a great list), but we need volunteers and people to get something in that direction done.

In short, I think the hardest part is to have people compile these lists together and to maybe create a more globalized OI specific community, besides the various national servers which exist already and are already helpful in their own way too.

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    4 months ago, # ^ |
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    Each nation has its different style but IOI is the standard I think. In my opinion mirrors (past OI problems) wont be enough. Official rounds would be way more better. I don't mean that the OI style contests should be hard as IOI, APIO etc. I think Codeforces needs official OI style rounds.

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      4 months ago, # ^ |
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      Let's make incremental improvements, I think we can do a lot of work together even without official support, and personally, I would rather see Codeforces deal with the issues surrounding it nowadays (cheating, server downtimes etc.) than trying what would be an ill-timed expansion.

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        4 months ago, # ^ |
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        I mean it's not that hard. Like the difference between Div. 3, Div. 4, Educational contests and Div. 2, Div. 1 (Div. 3, Div. 4 and Educationals are ICPC style while Div. 2 and Div. 1's are different). There is already "IOI style contest" option in polygon. The thing that we just need is having subtasks on problems. There is a section for that too. It's just a bit more work for writers. Nothing else.

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4 months ago, # |
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Well... OI style contests is just CF style contest without penalties and hacks with downloadable pretests.

So a available approach is to disable some of the special function of a contest. There may be:

  • XCPC = CF — hacks — systests.
  • OI = CF — hacks — penalties.
  • IOI = CF — hacks — penalties — systests.
  • There may be more...
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