As I was watching the Global Round 27 ranklist today, I can't stop but notice that 17th place sammyuri was only an IM before contest and pulled off a LGM performance! Not only that, he will become IGM after this contest!
After some research, I realized that Sam also made one of my favorite videos, Minecraft in Minecraft. And he just got an IOI gold medal in the most recent IOI 2024. Although I do not know Sam personally, I would still like to give him my felicitations and I wish him the best future!
sammyuri orz
Wow I remember my friend showing this to me a year or two ago. I wonder if minecraft in minecraft in minecraft is possible.
Red Isn't Impossible. ~Bakry
yes it is.
It is definitely impossible for most people. Tbh, I think that it is an extreme uphill battle even with IQ $$$2$$$ sd above average. I think you might need to be like $$$2.\bar{6}-3$$$ sd above average to become red. This range is somewhat backed by the research on the issue. That is okay, though. It is all about killing time (in a good way) and solving interesting problems at the end of the day.
Definitely more than 3sd. I'm failing at staying above expert...
Do not worry man; everyone has bad contests. It can be inferred from Ecclesiastes 3 that there is a time to gain rating and a time to lose rating, just like how there is a time to be born and a time to die. That is just how God made it. Since you have lost some rating, you will surely gain some soon. Also, it is not so bad if getting to red is impossible. We just gotta make the most with what God gave us.
Where is the research?
Tagging Jasonwei08
Well hopefully it is not so disappointing, but most of the research on this subject is not finished. There are a few reddit threads out there that have some discussion about it, and of course there is the one study with the OpenPsych test (not a great test, but some stuff can be inferred), but unfortunately I might be the only person actively making inferences wrt this subject. I do actually have a bit of in-progress stuff (which looks like it will be pretty conclusive), and I will post it when I am finished, but that might not be for a few weeks or a month or two.
For now, there is the study I linked, this one implying that there isn't too much of an IQ difference between a $$$2100$$$ and an $$$1800$$$ and this one showing what is called "wisdom of the crowd." I think, for the last one, people voting $$$<110$$$ are trolls, so just ignore them. So, actually, the average of a master is probably around 130.
Groundbreaking stuff. Looking forward to the results.
Interesting, thanks!
Just curious, where can I find said research?
I get that you're probably gaslighting when you bring up IQ in every discussion about rating, but here goes my take on this.
A few years ago even expert was an impossibility. I had no CS background and little math background, and as you can see on my rating graph it took many contests for me to even reach specialist. When I reached expert that in itself felt like an upper bound. However after almost a year of training after this I made it to candidate master for the first time. You often argue that for a "normal" person like me candidate master is the upper bound, and for almost 2 years it felt like I didn't improve. I kept working at it because while rating is a nice thing to have, the joy I got from solving each problem and trying to learn new things outweighed any sadness that I felt from not "improving" in rating. Eventually I got master.
Maybe I'm at peak right now, or maybe eventually I'll get red, but there's no way to tell at this point. Will I give up? Absolutely not. Do I believe its impossible to get red? Absolutely not. Was it an impossibility even a few years ago? For sure.
TL;DR Just be patient.
Well it looks like you were stuck at pupil-specialist when you were like $$$14$$$, and cognitive ability is known to generally increase pretty substantially from $$$14$$$ to $$$18$$$. So your progress isn't just from practice.
I'd like to add that it's the same case for the "Red isn't impossible" blog. Pretty much, you two started when you were kids, and got stuck for a while, but because kids get smarter as they get older, you two got better over time. And now you write these type of paragraphs, which I'm sure have $$$100$$$% good intentions (don't get me wrong there), but are kind of misleading. But the reality is that the gm who started past $$$18$$$ and was stuck at a low rank for over a year does not exist.
I'd argue that most adults don't have the time to get substantially better. Kids have all the time in the world, plus they usually have tutors specifically designed to help them get better.
Adults have university or jobs to do. I am quite confident that if you took an adult, paid for their living expenses and told them to grind CF for 4 years, provided them with a tutor, (assuming AI wasn't gonna kill off CF in like a year or two) then they'd definitely make red.
The problem with drawing the line of impossibility is that you can't imagine someone crossing it. And there will always be someone who can do it.
is it possible for you?
sammyuri orz
I was quite alarmed in the last 30 seconds of the contest to realise that my solution 288318171 to D was actually hackable! I had neglected to keep prefix sums of the answer in the monotonic stack, so it runs in $$$O(n^2)$$$ in the worst case. Fortunately no such tests existed in the system tests.
Feels good to finally be red!!
how to be you
orzz
plot twist: he was downvoting
i too :))
Met the man himself at IOI, he was a legend.
I met him at UK IOI TST. He's really cool!
BTW, he is talented in other things as well.
Like he built a CPU in Minecraft. And then made Minecraft inside Minecraft using that CPU.
You can just search by his name and you can see what he made.
OMG, never realized the guy who made the Minecraft in Minecraft video was also a competitive programmer! No wonder how his Minecraft builds are always good!
Dude is an IOI gold medalist. Tbh with someone capable of pulling the most impressive feat of Minecraft engineering at the age of 15 (literally constructed a CPU in Minecraft that supports a bit too much), NOT being an IOI medalist is much harder lmao