haleyk100198's blog

Evaluating problem difficulty for hard problems during problem setting?
By haleyk100198, history, 7 years ago, In English

Hi CodeForces!

Recently I have been trying to set some problems on my own, but soon I find out that it's hard to evaluate the exact difficulty of the harder problems. I setted up five problems and endeavoured most of my effort into the hardest one, after testing it with my testers I made the problem even harder. Originally I was aiming for a div2E problem, but after raising the difficulty me and my tester decided that it should never be a div2E problem, and we aren't too sure whether it should be div1D or div1E (partially due to our lack of experience in solving them).

To all the problem setters out there, especially the ones who have setted div1 contest before, what's the difference between div1D and 1E problems to you in terms of difficulty? Or do you just set problems and sort them in terms of difficulty without considering "it should fit the difficulty of XXX" at the first place?

I know maybe I should follow my feelings and make my own decision since I am the one who know the best about my own mysterious problem, but I really don't want to have a terrible debut on problem setting, so I would really appreciate some foresights from the community. =]

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7 years ago, # |
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7 years ago, # |
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Hey, I'm not an expert in estimating complexity (as all my contests showed :D), but my suggestion is to ask several strong participants to solve your d1D and d1E and measure the time it takes for them. Then derive some average time value, compare it and you're done!

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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    How do you decide which strong participants to ask to test the problems? Do you message high rated participants or is there some other way?

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    7 years ago, # ^ |
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    Thanks, yet unfortunately I can't find strong participants who are willing to solve them. :/

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