About an hour before the round, a friend told me that there was a Div. 2 today. So out of pure boredom, I decided to participate, because why not. I was 20 points away from CM, and if I just solve A,B,C,D, I shouldn't lose any rating.
So I bought a large coffee, and got to work. I solved A,B,C in 10 minutes and then I started working on D. It took me 27 minutes, a long time considering how simple the solution was, but I kept going. Then I started solving E1. It took me a while to get to the correct observation, and even longer to implement it with all the bugs I was getting. But I kept going. Eventually I solved it.
Now I was really excited. E2 seemed impossible at first, but then I was able to solve it with an alternative bitset solution. But not before getting a wrong answer because I forgot to make the bitset bigger after debugging.
Despite all of these mistakes, I was still top 20 (top 10 if you consider trusted participants). And imagine how high I would have been if I didn't make those mistakes.
It felt like I was on top of the world. I can't describe how it feels to finally be CM after all these years. I skipped F because it looked really hard, so I started chilling until I saw an announcement that made my stomach drop:
Unfortunately, it was discovered only now that the statement was missing an important condition. The correct statement should include the line "The operation 2 can only be applied at most once." The statement will be corrected soon.
We believe this issue affected many participants of this round, and therefore we have to declare this round unrated. We sincerely apologize for this mistake.
All that hard work, all the stars that had to align, all the keystrokes I entered into my laptop, was a waste of time and effort. Why do I even bother? What's the point of it all?
According to Carrot, I would have gained 156 points if those 3 words were in the statement.
I understand some people were affected by this and had their rating drop, but why should I be deprived of points too?
I suggest making the round rated for people with nonnegative deltas. It's only fair to others and myself who have to put up with newbies who don't even know what a 2D array is copy code from some Indian streamer on telegram.
Bro be grateful to the problem makers,they invest atleast 6 months in making questions be happy that you got a contest to enjoy dont cry so much downvoting you for this reason
if you want to rant then do it in some fucking subreddit
what bad investment 6 months with fucking wrong statement? go play their, newbie
this is my cousins account lol
To be honest, I really like the problems in the round. I just wish I would get my rating for the work I did.
I'll be thinking of a reply to this comment for 6 months and then I'll respond. You have to be grateful for it then.
if your solution of D got AC, that means that your solution for original problem(not for fixed one) is incorrect! and you should not complain about this round. BTW I got E1 first time for the long time, so this round was disappointment for me too.
Still it should not have gotten accepted. If it was wrong, I would have got WA and tried a different approach.
The majority of Div1 participants didn't even spot that edge case (including LGM's). Would you call them incompetent too? (Moral of the story: it's quite difficult to spot that edge case, especially with just a small set of testers).
I think, just like you said, the contest should be rated but no one should lose rating, which is the fairest outcome possible, since no one would be harmed (except maybe in local rankings), and that’s nothing compared to the damage if the contest became unrated, especially for those who were about to move up to a new rank and even more for those who had been trying to reach it for a long time.
Fr bro how did none of these testers see this stupid mistake and the counter case is also of size n=4 not like its hard to spot it a very stupid bruteforce sol stress test should spot it.