In many of the last rounds, I feel like the real challenge isn’t the problem itself, it’s understanding the problem statement. For me (and I’m sure for many others, especially non-native English speakers), about 10 minutes (sometimes even more) of the contest are often wasted just trying to decode what the setter wanted to say.

While this is a natural part of competitive programming, sometimes complicated phrasing, weak samples, or missing explanations make things even harder and while we are sitting there translating the statement into plain English, cheaters are already done. They don’t even read the statement, just copy a solution from YouTube, Telegram, or AI (There are many cheating resources), change a few lines or even convert the code into python, and submit. The time they spend is less than what we spend just understanding what we are asked to do.

If the idea behind making statements complicated was to make life harder for cheaters, I think it is harder for us more than them.

I want to thank every problem setter who spends hours of their time preparing contests and thanks for MikeMirzayanov for Codeforces and Polygon.