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What's the coolest/funniest/weirdest problem statement you've ever seen?
By Beacon, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hey guys,

Whats the most unique or coolest problem statement for a competitive programming problem you've seen? Doesn't have to just be from codeforces.

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10 months ago, # |
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First ,let's look at this problem from China.

[Blue Bridge Cup 2023 Province A] Buy melons

Title Description

Xiao Lan is buying melons at a melon stall. There are a total of n melons on the melon stand, each weighing $$$A_ I $$$. Xiaolan Dao is very skilled. He can split any melon into two completely equal parts, but each melon can only be split once.

The sum of the weights of the melons that Xiaolan hopes to buy is exactly $$$m $$$.

May I ask how many melons Xiaolan needs to chop in order to buy a melon with a weight of exactly $$$m $$$. If no matter what, Little Blue cannot obtain a melon with a total weight of exactly $$$m $$$, please output $$$-1 $$$.

Input Format

The first line of input contains two integers $$$n, m $$$, separated by a space, representing the number of melons and the total weight of the melons that Xiaolan wants to buy.

The second line contains n integers A_ I

Unable to parse markup [type=CF_MATHJAX]

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For the $$$60 \% $$$evaluation case, $$$n \ leq 20 $$$;

For all evaluation cases, $$$1 \ leq n \ leq 30 $$$, $$$1 \ leq A_ I \ leq 10 ^ 9 $$$, $$$1 \ leq m \ leq 10 ^ 9 $$$.

Yous should know,in China it has a meme named "华强卖瓜",and a blogger slove this problem and sent it on the Internet. this's the link:

Click it(https://www.luogu.com.cn/problem/solution/P9234)

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10 months ago, # |
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This must be the first: AtCoder Birthday Problem X

And this: Is It Rated?

If "traditional" CP tasks are not necessary, then you should know the last task in each round of a chinese CP contest named THUPC is eligible. Like this.

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    This must be the first: AtCoder Birthday Problem X

    Similar problem appeared in Vietnam in 2012: link

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      10 months ago, # ^ |
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      Indonesian National Olympiad in Informatics 2012 (coincidentally same year as Vietnam?): link

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10 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +33 Vote: I do not like it

GOV chronicles from Timus has a very long problem statement describing a story of a particular ICPC team. Each of the people that ever was a member of the team got assigned an identifier from 0 to 13. The problem asks you to, given the identifier, print the number of contests this person participated in as a part of the team.

I remember some high-rated participant (enot110?) was doing a stream like "I solve timus problems of a particular rating, and if I can't solve it in 20 minutes I do X push-ups". I suggested the problem and the streamer had to do push-ups after it :D

Besides that, problems from Codeforces Aprils fools contests are notorious for not having any statement (only input/output format). Then, there are also notorious problems such as

I think there are also a lot of "unorthodox" problems in Gassa and Petr contests.

P.S. Why does the title says that this post was written 2 years ago?

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    10 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +28 Vote: I do not like it

    Hello! Thanks for the komment

    Uh, about the 2 years ago part, I'm not so sure myself — this is actually the first blog post I made when I first started codeforces, and I am not sure why people suddenly started making comments here now, but yeah

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10 months ago, # |
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Translation
Illustrated examples
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    10 months ago, # ^ |
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    Can not stop laughing, thank you for making my day)

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10 months ago, # |
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1663A - Who Tested?

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10 months ago, # |
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An unexpected kind of problem format: H. Human Resources

A problem in wich my non deterministic solution some times gets accepted and some times wrong answer: I. 1%-Euclidean

My solution is:

But I think that probably it is not the expected solution

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10 months ago, # |
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This problem from OmegaUp, a Mexican judge. At first I thought the problem statement was broken, that it was some type of bug, but no, the problem statement is just like that.

I would like to explain the statement but that would spoil the problem.

Spoiler

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