paulinia's blog

How good are USACO training resources?
By paulinia, history, 8 years ago, In English

I wonder if it's worthy to code all the annoying introduction problems in order to get to the harder ones. Are the later problems good training worthy coding that too many easy tasks?

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8 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it

There are many good problems, but even the most recent problems are about 15 years old, and IOI and other contests have evolved quite a lot after this. I would probably prefer problems in recent USACO contests.

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8 years ago, # |
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I've always embraced recent USACO tasks, but the training gateway is very tedious and I don't feel that it is worth spending time

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    I think their system is excellent for people who can't or aren't motivated to choose adequate enough problems. And it certainly gave me a good start.

    But you are right about tedious. At some point there was a problem where a graph was given by a list of edges each edge meets at its endpoints. Also there are many trivial or semi-trivial DFS tasks even in the late sections.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      ko_osaga -is-this-fft-
      And you finished all the chapters?
      I'm in chapter two and it looks good, but if it's not effective at all, I have to stop!

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        8 years ago, # ^ |
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        I solved some of them in other online judge, but I don't even have a ID

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
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      till which chapter did you complete,how much time did it took you?

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        7 years ago, # ^ |
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        I think I am somewhere in the middle of the fifth chapter now. I haven't logged on in a while though.

        How much time it took me is more or less meaningless, but the first submission must have been in late January 2015. I took many long breaks due to the annoying nature of many problems there though. I want to say the actual problem solving time was about 4 months, but this number really doesn't mean much if you consider other forms of training I went through.

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          7 years ago, # ^ |
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          I am currently doing Div2 C problems from codeforces for practice,would you recommend me to attempt USACO problems,since you have experienced them..also what other forms of training you went through?!I am a complete beginner and just doing questions by ordering by submissions(from codeforces only)!

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            7 years ago, # ^ |
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            You probably should do them I guess. But I think you are worrying too much about the wrong thing. The important thing is that you are solving problems that are a serious challenge to you. Where those problems come from is only of secondary importance.

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              7 years ago, # ^ |
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              the problems I am doing are a challenge to me infact I am not able to do many of them and have no idea about the problem so I end up seeing the editorials for many problems that I attempt..I wonder if doing this will improve my performance

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                4 years ago, # ^ |
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                final_tsu what did you do after this comment?

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      For what it's worth, I think grinding through tedious problems like annoying DFS is one of the better ways to get good at implementation. I think I did this via a bunch of ad-hoc ProjectEuler problems and USACO training problems.

      On the other hand, it is tedious, so try not to get too stuck and lose interest.

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        Would you recommend to solve them ,if someone is targeting for ICPC regionals.

        Or should we solve solve something else like Timus, a2oj online judge

        thanks for response.

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          4 years ago, # ^ |
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          There are a lot of past ICPC contests available in the CF Gym or Kattis or other judges, so those are always decent (prep for what's actually coming). Other than that, do problems you feel like you're particularly weak in, from whatever judge has them.

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