Hello,
I am really facing difficulty while solving tasks that require some observations to be made. Even though I solve many tasks related to them. Whenever I solve a new task again I end up thinking and not able to proceed any further. What can be done in order to improve my ability to draw neat and correct observations? How do you tackle this problem if you were in my situation?
Thanks.
Observations are possible when you know about the properties of the related topic of the problem quite deep. It seems that You try to solve a lot and do not read theory. I suggest you read theories and revise them regularly. Hopefully, it will improve your observation skills.
Let's take this task as an example.1205A - Almost Equal. Now we don't need any theory to solve this task. Now the editorial of this draws observations that I am not able to when practicing. Of course, if I sit for more than an hour(or even more) I might reach to the observations as made in the editorial. But this does not work if I am in a contest. I need to be fast and efficient. How??
At first, there might be a problem solving D1A if almost everything you practice is D2A and D2B. According to statistics, you have two huge spikes on difficulties 900 and ~1100. That's not where you will get observation patterns. You should raise difficulty and be ready to read editorials a lot.
Thanks for your reply. So I need to solve a lot of tasks having difficulty more than 1100 right?
Yes. If you generally solve problems in some level without troubles, you probably waste time solving them.
There are not many observations, most of them are repeated or a mixture of few. Solve 40-60 problems a bit higher than your level, then your observation will improve definitely. spend around 20-25 minutes on thinking and if you still can't solve it then just directly open the editorial. You don't need to spend too much time as you don't have enough knowledge or experience to solve that problem, so reading editorial is fine. Please make sure you try your best in those 20 minutes, sometimes it takes me 10 minutes to understand the question itself, so those 20 minutes are for exploring your ideas, not for reading the question.