szilb's blog

By szilb, 11 months ago, In English

Üdv, Codeforces!

Error-42, gortomi and I are glad to invite everyone to participate in Codeforces Round 1030 (Div. 2), which will be held on Jun/12/2025 17:35 (Moscow time). You will be given 6 problems and 1 subtask with 2 hours to solve them.

The round will be rated for participants of Division 2 with a rating lower than 2100. Division 1 participants can participate unofficially.

All problems are authored by Error-42, gortomi and me.

We would like to thank:

We hope you will enjoy and have fun in the contest. Sok szerencsét!

UPD1: Score distribution: 500 — 1000 — 1000 — (1250 — 1000) — 2500 — 3500

UPD2: Thanks for participating, editorial is out!

UPD3: Congratulations to the winners!

Div. 1:

  1. tourist
  2. ksun48
  3. tiger2005
  4. maspy
  5. StarSilk

Div. 2:

  1. geniorzity
  2. KaiKaKa
  3. 2ky
  4. Bronya_H
  5. hondacity
  • Vote: I like it
  • +311
  • Vote: I do not like it

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11 months ago, hide # |
 
Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

I hope that the problems are interesting and I everyone gets a positive delta , I reach Specialist !!!

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Vote: I like it +33 Vote: I do not like it

As a tester, I am glad to have been sapphire this time )

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Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

Interested! Just it would be fine if i don’t get wrong on first 3 problems.

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Vote: I like it +30 Vote: I do not like it

obsidian testing :orz:

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Vote: I like it +53 Vote: I do not like it

It was a pleasure doing obsidian testing as my very first Codeforces round! And what a round!

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Vote: I like it +27 Vote: I do not like it

Error-42 round orz

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Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

Hopefully the problems A-B-C are sorted difficulty wise unlike recent educational round

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Vote: I like it +22 Vote: I do not like it

As a tester, I'm really happy seeing my name in the first place of the row. I wish "Kéz és lábtörést!" for everyone participating!

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Vote: I like it +43 Vote: I do not like it

SpyrosAliv is a goated tester :)

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Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

I hope for a round with interesting problems and no Newbies performing like Grandmasters...

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Rev. 2  
Vote: I like it +46 Vote: I do not like it

It seems that this round is related to gems. I need to quickly review the algorithms about gems and minerals.

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Vote: I like it +52 Vote: I do not like it

As a banana tester, here is how we decide the score distribution:

Expectation
Reality
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Vote: I like it +21 Vote: I do not like it

Did the coordinator reject good problems too? (for anyone confused there is white text after rejecting our bad ideas)

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Vote: I like it +34 Vote: I do not like it

strong hungarian contest! glhf

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Rev. 5  
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Hoping for a good round.

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I hope to solve all problems (or at least 9 problems)

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Vote: I like it -27 Vote: I do not like it

Hopefully , I don't get wrong on pretest 2

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Ruby testing what is even that bruh obsidian testing too,GUYS ORZ

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Rev. 3  
Vote: I like it -26 Vote: I do not like it

thanks for the contest will try to perform better

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Vote: I like it -22 Vote: I do not like it

Why is there no emerald testing?

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orz

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Vote: I like it +33 Vote: I do not like it

Thank you for the beautiful problems.

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Vote: I like it +16 Vote: I do not like it

satyam343 for their amazing coordination and for rejecting our bad ideas (and several other problems too.) missing line

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good luck mates

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Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

Thank you for letting me test this amazing round, it was very fun!

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Hoping for a good and Positive Delta!

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I think I have reached a temporary bottleneck need to practice more often to reach Expert. Hope anyone can give me tips

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Did anyone else also notice that.. "and several other problems too."?? XD

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As a CF newbie, I hope to rated rising more, come on!

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Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

my first competition.hope to solve 1 problem?

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Vote: I like it +15 Vote: I do not like it

As a tester, it's a nice round

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Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

hopefully the round i finally reach CM :sob:

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I am very excited!

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All the best to everyone who are attending this contest

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Vote: I like it +7 Vote: I do not like it

i hope i reach expert for the first time after this contest!!!

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WHY I cannot paste code on phone?My computer is stuck and cannot login Codeforces.qwq

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Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

I hope I reach pupil in this contest

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who can tell me ,as a beginner, where should I go to look at the explanations for the problem?

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Vote: I like it +34 Vote: I do not like it

I lost my rank 1 :(

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Is this contest rated or unrated?

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oh no .. I got the idea for problem D2 but couldn't code it ... aaaaa!!!!

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How do you solve B?

I literally spent like 90 minutes on it.

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    same bro :(

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    Rev. 2  
    Vote: I like it +6 Vote: I do not like it

    I actually knew a trick which rotates the array

    so if array is abcde .. let me reverse first two and last 3 .. we get baedc ... now if you read this from a towards left .. you getabcde ... so this is a rotation of reverse of string ... this way you can find all rotations using 2 operations for each row and you can achieve

    edcba ( 1 reverse whole string )

    aedcb (reverse 1 to 1 and then 2-5)

    baedc (reverse 1 to 2 and then 3-5)

    cbaed (reverse 1 to 3 and then 4-5)

    dcbae (reverse 1 to 4 and then 5-5)

    although reverse (1,1 ) and reverse (5,5) are redundant... they are allowed in the problem and don't increase the count above 2*n

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    Follow this pattern

    1 1 n

    2 1 n-1

    2 n n

    3 1 n-2

    3 n-1 n

    4 1 n-3

    4 n-2 n

    and so on..

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    Alas,I was stuck on the same problem.

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    Rev. 2  
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    My intuition is to "shift" the original array, like:

    1234, 2341, 3412

    It couldn't complete in 2 flip. Instead, we can get a "reversed and shift" array by 2 flip:

    1234
    flip [1234] = [4321]
    flip [1] and [234] = [1][432]
    flip [12] and [34] = [21][43]
    flip [123] and [4] = [321][4]

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    something like that ~~~~~ void Solve() { int n; cin >> n; cout << 2 * n — 3 << endl;

    for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++)
    {
        int r1 = n - i + 1;
        if (r1 > 1)
            cout << i << " " << 1 << " " << r1 << endl;
        int l2 = n - i + 2;
        if (l2 < n)
            cout << i << " " << l2 << " " << n << endl;
    }

    } ~~~~~

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Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it

Just how angry must a person be to make that kind of Problem B. B >>>>>>>> C :(

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YEAH! MY FIRST DIV 2 CONTEST SOLVING 2 PROBLEMS IN A LONG TIME. THANK Y'ALL!!!!

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THE B PROBLEMMMMMMMM

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Any chance for py to pass D1 in O(qnk)?

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I was going to submit on D2 and time finished 0.5 seconds before i submit

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    same but I needed few more minutes to test :(

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      10 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
      Vote: I like it +6 Vote: I do not like it

      I solved the whole problem but was stuck on this very classical task for some reason

      given a directed graph and queries where a query asks you for a node

      just output "YES" if its in cycle and "NO" otherwise

      i solved it in the end but too late

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        10 months ago, hide # ^ |
         
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        yeah me too.. but I needed more time to debug my solution as it was giving wrong answer near the end of the contest LOL :'(

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Vote: I like it +7 Vote: I do not like it

I was only 1 second away from successfully submitting my E solution — when I moved my mouse over the submit button, the contest showed it was over

My mistake was: I swapped n and m, but didn't flip the output。:))))))

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Can someone help me figure out why I am getting TLE (Problem C) on https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2118/submission/324135426. The time complexity is n(logk)^2

It seems to work whenever k is less than ~10^9. But n=1, a[0]=0, k=1e10 seems to break it :(.

Thanks

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Vote: I like it +21 Vote: I do not like it

(B)>>>>(D)>(C)>(A)

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    Rev. 2  
    Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

    Well it's kinda like intuitive problem I guess. I followed my intuition and luckily it got accepted.

    I hope I can become pupil again after 609 days...!!

    Update: Bullseye. Finaly !! :)

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      10 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
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      It didn't feel intuitive. The B problems are usually designed in such a way that the examples give away the algorithm. But these examples were totally misleading. Needing to reverse the first string and sacrificing an operation that way is a huge assumption to make .

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        10 months ago, hide # ^ |
         
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        Never trust examples, examples, from what ives seen are always misleading

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Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it

Problem B demoralized me so badly,I left the contest halfway.

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
    Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it

    Same. I solved A in 1 minute, then spent 58 mins (!!) on B. Honestly skill issue on my end for overcomplicating it, but yeah :(

    Could've had such a good run today if I solved B like I usually do. C was quick and I had the idea for D pretty quickly but didn't have the time.

    Oh well, back to specialist I go :,)

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      10 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
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      After spending too much time on Problem B, my brain just froze, and I ended up leaving the contest without even looking at the next problems. Definitely need to bounce back stronger in the next contest.

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Is there any easy to code for D1, i got stuck at dfs with memoization for 1 hours ToT.

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    Well, I defined state[i][j][b] to mean that we are currently at stoplight I, at time j mod k, and b is 0 or 1 indicating we are facing left or right. Then it’s just a matter of cycle detection from the first stoplight we hit. Let -1 indicate the state is unprocessed, 0 for under processing, 1 for having been processed and answer is no, and 2 for having been processed and answered is yes. That’s pretty much it.

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    for D1 you don't need DFS ... you can simulate the whole process ...

    but your solution might have solved D2 I think

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      10 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
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      My dfs is like dfs(int pos, int timer, int state) to know where is the traffic light we are in and the total time mod k and state is go left or right so how can I improve this to do D2.

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        10 months ago, hide # ^ |
         
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        oh so for D2 the idea I came up with was ... you can draw and edge between i and j if pos[i] + d[i] MOD k was same for both... but you need to remember the direction of edge ... like i to j or j to i

        now with one DFS / BFS you can find out if a node is on a cycle ... then you can't escape if you meet a node

        I thought you were doing DFS like this

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Vote: I like it +41 Vote: I do not like it

My luckiest contest

1030E.png

My E idea: First color the center, then color the outer circle of the center, and then color the outer circle of this outer circle,... For a circle, the closer it is to the four corners, the later the color should be.

Code: 324136762

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
    Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

    Yup i did the same.Just sorted using chess and manhattan from centre and tried my luck

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      10 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
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      Did that and got WA on test case 2 ;-;

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        10 months ago, hide # ^ |
         
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        checkout my last second submission, i defined comparator for chess than manhattan then x then y and took the distance from center (it was mentioned odd n,m so that was the motivation)

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          10 months ago, hide # ^ |
           
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          Just realized my error was that I was solving recursively from rectangles inside rectangles ;-; (which lead to WA when the rectangle was not a square).

          Had I just sorted the points instead of adding a recursion on top of it I would get AC

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I after reading B was intuitive to understand that it needed some left rotation logic that needs, to be done, but couldn't figure out the logic of left rotating within 2 operations, can someone tell me how to do it? Also, which type (tag) of problems on codeforces should I practice, to improve my intuition and logic for these kind of problems. Any help or suggestion would be appreciated...

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How are B and C the same score?

C is way too much easier than B

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Solved ACE but not B. Oh well.

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Rev. 2  
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Why this testcase gives YES in D ?

1
3 4
5 6 7
1 3 3
1
6
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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    Lights on position 6 and 7 will be red on t = 3. During t = 0 you will be on position 6 and move to the right, for t = 1 you will be on position 7 and move to the right. Once you move to position 8 you can leave.

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is it possible to simulate the entire process in D1? i tried doing DFS with directed edges but i couldnt implement it

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if only i had read C before B :(

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I don't think D1 is a proper problem that can exist in the contest. First, the solution of D1 and D2 are totally different. Secondly, D1 worths 1250 point so that solve D1 first can gain more score than solving D1 and D2 at the same time (maybe D1-500p, D2-1750/1500p would be better).

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
    Vote: I like it +22 Vote: I do not like it

    D1 was added to bridge the difficulty gap between C and D2.

    First, the solution of D1 and D2 are totally different.

    I do not agree with this in general. It might be the case for your solutions. It is true that D1 does not require much thinking. But it is still a decent task for div 2 participants. That is why it was added. Sometimes, we do need to add some filler problems to balance the contest.

    maybe D1-500p, D2-1750/1500p would be better)

    In my opinion, D1 should definitely have more points than B and C. Yes, it could be argued that we should have had more points for D2. We were in fact thinking about having (1250 + 1250). But we did not do that. A lot of div 2 participants would be affected if we had low points for D1 (slow ABCD1 getting beaten by fast ABC). That is why we kept more points for D1 than B and C. We did not increase the points for D2, because we might need to increase the points of E too in that case (well, difficulty of D2 versus E is debatable). But that's the issue with subtasks, which are sometimes needed to bridge the difficulty curve.

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      Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

      I agree, this contest has good balance, spent full 2 hours solving problems.

      Even though I didn't solve my last one in time I still feel fulfilled.

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Vote: I like it -19 Vote: I do not like it

Wasn't left with enough time to implement D2 so prompted GPT with the (not so well explained) idea and it gave a short and clean code. Didn't submit that, but wouldn't have been that hard to make edits and escape plag from other GPT generated codes.

I wonder if the AI guidelines could be relaxed when the prompt itself fully specifies the solution and implementation, as those only seem to serve as a compliance checklist for genuine competitors due to the system's inability to catch every violation.

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Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it

If anyone asks whether rainboy strategy is good:

I started today's contest on problem E (not even the last one). After almost one hour and WA on test case 2 I gave up and went to D. Solved D2 and D1 close to the end of the contest and still had some spare time left to solve C. Tried A without even reading the problem properly and that was it. Final result: ~ position 6000 (which is around 1330 performance, almost 800 below my rating).

So yeah, don't do rainboy strategy unless you mogg the contest you are doing

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Am I the only one that found C super easy?

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    compared to B it was easy.

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      I found it the other way around lol. Did B in a couple mins but had to think carefully about C.

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        whoa how did you do B .. and how did you come up with the operations ...

        I was able to solve only because I had seen how to rotate a string with reversal before... I think without that I would have suffered in B

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          I knew that B was the type of problem where you can rabbit-hole and spend a lot of time on it if you try to build from the ground-up (speaking from experience lmao). So, looking at 2*n, I just thought of general, visually appealing patterns like partitioning each row into 2 segments and just incrementing the partition at each row. Checked on a few examples and it worked, so I knew inductively it should more or less work.

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            wow, cool to think like that in competition pressure.. I just cry and leave the contest :(

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          10 months ago, hide # ^ |
           
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          You would want a permutation in first column, for that you would reverse substrings starting at first pos and ending at increasing pos. After this the configuration of matrix we would have gives clear indication of what needs to be done from their on. Soln was observation on matrix of small sizes.

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      Well I found it super easy in general. It was blatantly obvious to me that you first fill out the smallest missing bits. Just curious if someone else had the same experience.

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        yeah that is true, but how to implement it so that you can accumulate all the lowest powers can be a bit tricky I think.

        I am just glad it was not a XOR question because then I cry :(

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          How is it tricky. I just went through the numbers on a and added the costs for each missing bit into a vector. Then I just sorted the vector. Also, why was $$$n$$$ in C only $$$5000$$$?

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            I did the same way but earlier I was thinking it was some complicated bit manipulation so I was a bit worried ... maybe I was overthinking as it was problem C

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    I also think so

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i am so restarted solved only A

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B killed me

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Rev. 3  
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My solution for problem C got accepted in pretest but somehow got skipped during main test, is this possible? do I need to report this ?

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Konsa ganja fuk ke Question banaya tha

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Are you gonna give ratings without showing the standings? Like suprise mf.

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Rev. 2  
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my jugaad solution for D1, simply simulated it- got tle/wa added a count-- variable on every rebound,played around some values and 1000 seems to work.

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    Rev. 2  
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    So I use DFS to solve D1.Find a position with a light and a time to start,then see what happens the next light and so on.

    For example,input data:

    3 1000
    9 99 616
    819 0 0 1
    

    You choose to start at the second light at time 514,and it’s equal to start at the third light at time (514+616-99)%1000 = 31.Since it may change your facing direction,you should enumerate two directions.

    That will be O(n^2),available to solve D1 but not D2.

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    i did the same lmao just to be safe i set that count to 1e4

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B is kind of ad-hoc.C and D are quite GREAT problems!!!

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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I wasted my 90 minutes just to give up on D1

Good contest anyway, A, B, C was nice. B was a little bit tricky for me tho.

-orz-

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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Could someone explain problem B to me in a simpler way? I still don't quite understand it and what's the approach for solving problems like that?

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
    Rev. 2  
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    see , if you try one thing is that a reverse of every row from 1 to n in two parts, guarantees a permuation for every col of the array , like 12345 first row reverse it full from 1 1 5 ,then row 2 , we do shift 2 1 1 and 2 2 5 , same with 3 3 1 2 and 3 3 5 and so on , any doubt ??

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    10 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    Construct an objective matrix whose first column is 1,2,3... n. The i-th column is the result of moving the (i — 1)-th column down by one cell.

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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Problem D1 is straight forward recursion, but couldn't code it out during context :(

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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Hi, I received a message about my solution (ID 323515523) for 2117E being similar to others. I wrote the solution myself, but it’s possible that some part matched with others because I referred to some materials online during practice and may have unintentionally followed a common pattern. I also used an online IDE to test my code, which might have made it accessible to others unintentionally. I didn’t share my code with anyone. I’ll be more careful in future contests. Thank you.

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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Dear Codeforces

I haven't "cheated" in a single contest. And still I am getting skipped for contests regularly this month. I have my intern season upcoming and these are the mails that I keep getting? And in this contest apparently I cheated from two different people? Bruh, they are my friends. That doesnt mean we are going to cheat.

This month, you are just putting allegations on me with any friend in my friend list and one was even unknown. I dont even know who the hell he is.

If my codeforces id, password has leaked, I am changing it right now. But I haven't cheated in a single contest.

You can see my profile. I am a trusted participant since 2023. My growth has never been too steep. I cant solve hard problems with ratings of 1800s or 1900s.

At last, I want to state it clearly that I have never cheated and I have a favour to ask that please don't suspend my account. My intern season is very nearby.

With respects Srijan Kumar

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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How on earth my solution for https://mirror.codeforces.com/problemset/problem/2118/E got skipped due to following plague:

Solution of user matching with me -: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2118/submission/324093020

Mine solution -: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2118/submission/324127586

It was a short and obvious solution without much logical implementation just a custom sorting applied and that is quite standard in JAVA(custom comparator sorting). Just the sorting logic and the custom class name(Cell) is same and this much coincidence resulted on both solutions getting skipped in fact the entire contest skipped on these basis.

Really unfair and unjust on such a platform, I know plagiarism and other checks are must but not at this cost of ruining someone's profile like this. This not only affected my rating but also my profile, dignity and image on this platform.

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hello

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For solution 324123859 of problem 2118C: I was warned for copying another solution. I did not copy code from anybody and came up with the solution myself by implementing a greedy bit-flip algorithm using cost-efficient bit increments (via __builtin_ctzll() and 2^bit operations). The solution is quite natural and optimal in the budget case, so identical solutions might emerge. I'd be glad to provide version history or local timestamps if necessary. Please take this explanation into account in your review. It would affect my rating.

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10 months ago, hide # |
 
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Competitive Programming in 2025 – A Broken Race?

Two coders. Same leaderboard.

  1. One writes 200+ lines, fails test case #83, debugs, and finally ACs.
  2. The other pays ₹25 and submits instantly.

Result?

  1. Both rank above you. One earned it.
  2. The other bought it.

The problem: CP is turning into a “pay-to-win” model.

Impact:

  1. Honest coders feel demotivated
  2. Rankings lose meaning

The spirit of CP is at risk !!

The ask: Platforms like Codeforces, CodeChef, LeetCode must act fast. Cheating isn’t just breaking rules — it's breaking the community.

Let’s keep CP clean. Let’s keep it fair. Agree or disagree?