We're really sorry for the inconvenience in the contest Codeforces Round 482 (Div. 2) today.
It is our fault that the statements, especially the statement of the B problem, were absolutely ambiguous. I understand that many of you are frustrated, angry or even hate the contest. Moreover, we want to apologize for the weak pretests on problem A and B. We intended the problems to have many corner cases, yet failed to include those corner cases in the pretest.
We have been waiting for a really long time to present to you our creations, to make the community happy. But instead, what we just did was such a mess.
As the last words, we are really thankful for joining our contest, and we also apologize for all the mistakes that we've made during the preparation of the contest.
Please take this apology with an open mind.
It's ok. Be careful from next time. I have high hopes from you. I'm counting on you. Hope you do as per my expectations
Will the contest be unrated?
Sadly not. We had a discussion and decided not to unrate this contest.
Better apologize for problem D and don't make such shit anymore.
Problem B and hacks on it were fine, and in problem A you should have added that test to pretests, but not doing it is acceptable too.
I didn't think there were any problems with D to be honest. Please let me know the issues for us to make progress next time.
It's just another "given an array, answer the queries: find a shit that shit 1 holds, shit 2 holds and shit 3 is minimal" problem. Such problems are bad and they shouldn't exist.
Lol dude. With so many other problems, you could only catch this. Also if you feel shit, y not just code it.
I actually can't understand why you hate this problem. Having a bad legend doesn't mean it's bad overall, I actually think it's a nice interesting problem. What the problem if it's formulated as "find a shit that shit 1 holds, shit 2 holds and shit 3 is minimal"? It still has an interesting solution and nice coding.
brute force accepted :|
I think the tests for D is too weak
someone solved it with brute force...
I understand your situation. We are not good enough with creating and distributing tests in overall. We will make progress next time.
Though the contest has ended, problem will remain forever for practice.
So, please, add the tricky test cases to the problem so that in practice mode, no one can get ACCEPTED with brute force solution.
Also, in Problem A, it was not mentioned that no amount of pizza should be wasted..!!
Why is the answer for test 86, problem B draw ? Katie can change 'b' to 'a' then 'a' to 'b' then 'b' to 'a', but the other 2 can't cycle... i also don't understand the editorial... i would like some examples and the moves that the we make to play optimally...
other 2: aaaaa->aaaaz->aaaay->aaaaa
Can i the reasons why it is rated？
Wow, it's actually such a rare case when people accepts critic and even apologise, and not like "I don't care what you say, I did everything right". I remember when one man copypasted problem from open source and used it, so you could google it during contest, and then he was caught he started shitposting like "you are lying/exaggerating" and stuff.
So, I guess, apology accepted, wish you be better next time, hope it won't be the last!
Div3 forever! <3
Hi! I don't actually think you have to put so much blame on you. You've prepared a good contest, much better than many I've coordinated, and there weren't any major mistakes. Probably that is why I was less careful checking the statements and everything else, because I've only edited a few places and everything seemed ok. Most rounds required much more work, and, thinking that your round was ok and considering the amount of other stuff I had to do these days I decided to spend less time working with your round. That is why I think you've done a great work, I hope to see you as an author again. And sorry to the community for the issues in the round.
I’ve read the problems and I can relate that statement of B is clear enough.
What I personally dislike is D — it feels kinda artificial (like okay, let’s generate several random conditions and ask to find something that satisfies them and withal maximizes something else, lmao).
Keep up the good work and merely accept the fact that people would rather start complaining than carefully read the statement and figure it out :)
I'm sorry to disagree, but problem B is not clear enough. There are many valid interpretations, that even if you think they are "stupid interpretations", it takes time to realize that. The time you spend on a problem should be trying to solve it, not trying to disambiguate it.
Having said that, this doesn't mean that the round was shit, or the problems were bad, on the contrary, once you understand the problems they are quite interesting.
About problem D, I partially agree, it doesn't bother me to have "artificial" problem statements (since there are interesting problems that sadly are artificial and difficult to hide in a problem statement), but the problem statement should make really clear what it wants you to find, since given that you are only told the formulas, it's pretty easy to confuse a small part of the description, and ending with a completely different approach.
But overall, the most important point that I want to emphasize is that pretests should be strong. There is no reason to make them weak, since if you do so, you will end up with newbies like me getting +1k worth of points just by noticing the trivial, corner case, and of course, with people complaining about that.
The way I see hacks is that they are a resource we have to avoid getting an unmanageable queue during contest time. You could argue that it is important to read and find bugs in someone else's code, but if the pretests are weak, that's usually not the case, the game changes to "check trivial corner cases: overflow, n=0, etc., and start hacking with the exact same case".
If we make pretests stronger, then the +100 are really deserved, because it was non-trivial to find a hack for a solution, and it's probably not a hack for multiple solutions.