I was an admin of TopCoder for about 4 years. Recently I came back as a competitor and I participated in four SRMs. Here are my performances:
SRM 681 Hard: CoinFlips
It was an easy DP, but I started to implement something stupid and wasted time. When I finished coding around 5 minutes before the end of the contest, the server was slow and I couldn't compile my solution. Though the match was unrated, I should have solved it earlier.
SRM 682 Hard: TheKFactor
My solution failed because of precision errors (in Linear Programming). I should have used long doubles instead of doubles (and passed in the practice room).
SRM 683 Hard: RandomWalkOnGrid
Failed systest because of two (!) stupid mistakes: incorrect array size and integer overflow.
SRM 684 Hard: Permutant
Missed cases with a.size() == 1. Failed systest again.
It's really important to keep participating in TopCoder matches. Now I can't solve anything!
Is TC matches so different from CF?
I don't know why, but it seems so.
Yeah, I agree. I find Topcoder problems much harder to solve than Hacker Cup's, Code Jam's or Codeforces' ones. I don't know why either, I guess they are mostly DP and math nowadays, with a few occasional graph problems, while the other platforms' problems involve a much wider variety of topics.
SRM's are more mathy and are more random (with bigger variance)
If you have ever participated in ACM ICPC competitions, which one is closer to an ACM ICPC competition: a TC round or a CF round?
I don't think you should treat any of them as something similar to ICPC. I'm not even able to answer your question.
In terms of the style of the problems, I'd say that Codeforces is more similar. But neither of them is similar in the system they use.
ACM-ICPC runs your solution on the full testcase set when you submit, so if you have a small bug or there's a corner case you didn't realize, you'll get WA and you'll have the opportunity to debug. On the other hand, if that happens on CF or TC, you'll most likely pass pretests, be convinced that your solution is OK, only to get 0 points at the end of the contest.
You just won FHC, so it doesn't look that you "can't solve anything!".
What happened to Topcoder? Why interface turned mickey mouse-ish?
i was waiting for you to get to top10 contributors since your FHC blog
Now he's on.
You should do a blog showing what and how are you doing the TC problems(In english please).