SGTCoder's blog

By SGTCoder, history, 4 years ago, In English

Hello Everyone, As u all have noticed that There is no upcoming contest since last 3 days on codeforces and even it has been observed that there is only 1 contest happening in a week (approx) i don't know what happened to codeforces !!

Some people are saying that this year Codeforces is going to decrease their frequency of contest and making problems in contest more interesting (quality wise) but i don't agree with this contest happening in 2020 and their frequency were really good , there was no issues regarding the problem set as well, we were getting to learn something new only in each contest !!

and there is nothing like that the problems were not interesting. MikeMirzayanov Kindly requesting you on the behalf of everyone that please have the contest frequency as it was before.Thank you !!

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4 years ago, # |
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I completely agree with this.MikeMirzayanov we want same frequency of contest as it was before !!

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4 years ago, # |
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completely agreed with this !!

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4 years ago, # |
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I think many people are waiting, and visiting contest page again and again in hope to see an update for upcoming contest.

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4 years ago, # |
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Some people complain about frequency.
Some people complain about quality or type of problems,Can both be achieved???
Is it possible to maintain frequency but also come up with new problem ideas other than ad-hoc??

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    That is a very difficult question. Nowadays, many common areas such as array-like data structures, graph theory, number theory and dynamic programming optimizations are widely researched. There were many problems which basically said 'write this algorithm', and this type of problems (e.g. LCS with Hirschberg optimization) is now mostly extinct. The reason is that there used to be quite simple algorithms and data structures, such as prefix sums, segment tree and many divide-and-conquer-based optimizations, which gave a decent optimization factor, e.g. by $$$\mathcal{O}(n)$$$ for prefix sums, $$$\mathcal{O}(\frac{n}{\log n})$$$ for segment tree, or $$$\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$$$ for sqrt optimization. Nowadays, all these algorithms are widely known, and new algorithms give smaller optimization factors, mostly logarithmic. It makes it next to impossible to separate an optimal solution in Python from a dumb solution in C++. If we keep algorithms-based problems, only programmers using C/C++/Rust/Java will succeed.

    Even then, new 'secret' algorithms such as matroid intersection are quite hard to write during 2 hour contests, and it's next to impossible to come up with them yourself. There is very little intuition behind them, it's only about mathematics. So only those who have written the algorithm before or know where to find the source code will succeed. This would make CP too similar to industrial programming and make Codeforces just a very short hackathon.

    We're running off simple effective algorithms, all new 'effective' data structures are only effective on large scale (terabytes of data). Now, we can only have ad-hoc problems and non-asymptotic optimizations. The former implies CP is slowly being transformed into a mathematic olympiad, the latter implies CP with low-level languages only, non-classic problems and requires longer rounds.

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      Yeah, totally agreed with everything you said
      But I want to ask another question, if question would be majorly adhoc, knowledge bar required to reach certain rating has also been lowered,like once Umnik said he reached master without even knowledge of segment trees. How can rating define your knowledge of algorithms, obviously rating is measure of your handling mental pressure, creativity, also logic. But if you see the blog how to interpret your rating on codeforces, you could see that it is mentioned that expert+ is algorithms guru, but I have seen many people reaching candidate master knowing only basic knowledge like prefix sum, binary search.

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        All those blogs are outdated, there are very few algorithmic/data structure-based tasks on Codeforces now. Most problems are ad-hoc, so the rating does not show how many algorithms you are aware of. It's just about how mathematical your brain is today.

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4 years ago, # |
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There's a new one out now. Div 3!

Someone listened to your post :D