This contest had problems. A,B and C were suboptimal.

A and B were fully-GPT solvable. Paste statement into GPT, solve and done.

My friend got within the first 20 submissions on B with GPT despite submitting a wrong answer on both A and B. I got A and B within 6 minutes without GPT but clearly it could have been even easier with GPT. This can discourage new participants on codeforces from actually trying to solve the problem, when it’s simply easier to paste the problem into GPT and get a quick solve. Problem B was around 600-700 rating difficulty and so anyone below this rating would have experienced a rank increase by just pasting the statement into GPT and submitting. In fact, the problem is worse than this. Since C’s difficulty was around 1465, it was possible to get a 1430 performance from just A and B, so in this contest GPT would get 1430 performance, significantly above the average participant. This shows how codeforces is falling to GPT, and how much harder it is getting to write problems that cannot be easily solved by GPT. This however is a necessity to keep contests interesting for all participants.

The third problem was an interactive. It was a nice problem, however it is misplaced in such a contest. Many participants (myself included) have struggled severely with the interaction, and what is more, on the announcement it did say there would be an interactive problem, but in small, non boldface print. It should be a law for any interactive problem to be mentioned in 48 pt size bold underlined italic text to ensure that it is not missed, and to ensure that this problem is accessible to everyone.