1. Practice Regularly Puzzles and Brain Teasers: Engage in activities like puzzles, Sudoku, chess, or brain teasers that challenge your thinking. Real-Life Problems: Actively seek out problems to solve in your daily life, whether it’s optimizing a process at work or finding a more efficient way to complete a task at home.
2. Understand the Problem Ask Questions: Make sure you fully understand the problem by asking clarifying questions. This helps in identifying the root cause.
Break it Down: Divide complex problems into smaller, manageable parts. Tackling these smaller issues can make the larger problem less daunting.
3. Learn Different Problem-Solving Techniques SWOT Analysis: Analyze the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to the problem.
Whys Technique: Keep asking "why" to drill down into the cause of the problem. Mind Mapping: Visualize the problem and possible solutions using a mind map to organize your thoughts.
4. Develop Critical Thinking Question Assumptions: Challenge existing assumptions and consider alternative viewpoints. Analyze Outcomes: Think about the potential consequences of different solutions and weigh them against each other. 5. Improve Your Decision-Making
Pros and Cons: List the pros and cons of potential solutions to weigh their benefits and drawbacks. Prioritize: Focus on solving the most important parts of the problem first. 6. Collaborate and Seek Feedback Teamwork: Collaborate with others to gain different perspectives on the problem. Seek Feedback: After proposing a solution, seek feedback to refine and improve it. **** 7. Learn Continuously Read: Study books or articles on problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making. Take Courses: Consider taking courses or workshops that focus on these skills.
8. Embrace Failure Learn from Mistakes: View failure as a learning opportunity. Analyze what went wrong and how you can improve next time. Stay Resilient: Develop resilience to keep pushing forward, even when you encounter setbacks.
9. Reflect on Past Problems Review Past Solutions: Look back on problems you've solved before and analyze what worked and what didn’t. Document Your Process: Keep a journal of problems you’ve solved and the methods you used, which can serve as a valuable reference. **** 10. Stay Informed Current Events: Stay informed about current events and industry trends to enhance your knowledge base, which can help in solving relevant problems.
Auto comment: topic has been updated by Anac0ndaa (previous revision, new revision, compare).
tnx
How can i improve my problem solving skills
el fin
Why is it that you believe problem-solving ability is fixed (and in other comments that IQ is everything when it comes to competitive programming)? If you hold that to be true, why bother practicing or even participating?
Problem-solving ability is fixed, but codeforces problem-solving skills aren't, because tricks and techniques repeat. Either way, solving these problems and joining competitions is fun.
I don't think one can learn every trick/technique in Div 2A if they had no problem solving capacity, but most people can learn to solve div2A. Furthermore, USACO Bronze is notoriously strictly problem-solving ability with most problems being ad hoc, but there exist plenty of people, who despite initially struggling, learn to solve USACO Bronze. Both of these examples suggest that problem-solving is learned.
Not to mention people with a mathematics contest background tend to crush USACO Bronze despite the fact there exist little overlap in terms of tricks.
that's just cuz people who are interested in math competitions tend to be smarter than average
Sure, that may be true, but my greater point still stands, why do people get better at Div2A or USACO bronze?
Let's ignore USACO, since that is a high school thing. It is known that cognitive ability, on average, substantially increases during high school.
I don't think that a single person exists who has these traits:
If such a person exists, then maybe div. 2 A isn't such an IQ test.
This is circular reasoning.
Do you not see the problem in your reasoning?
I do not