I'm sorry for the long paragraph but please read before down voting.

Somebody told me that every competitive programmer is self made and that made me feel bad because I always got help when ever I got stuck. When I started CP I was very bad at implementation and algorithms and at every point someone always told me what to do with my code, it could be my friend, teacher, trainer etc. Only after a year I was at a position where I was doing okay.

And when this person said that "every competitive programmer is self made" it made me feel bad because if every competitive programmer is self made then even though I am doing okay now, my first year was not self made at all and it makes me think that I am not good/meant for CP.

So I need to know how correct or incorrect is the statement "every competitive programmer is self made" because this is really affecting me. I really hope I get some clarity from here because this is one of the best platform I can get help.

So my question is, Is every competitive programmer self made? If yes, how do you define "self made". Please be honest while answering.

Thank you and

Sorry again to waste your time on a non-technical query.

Hello codeforces.

I am re-posting this blog once again because last time we received many request to change things regarding the ISPC contest and the camp. So here goes the announcement of ISPC 2019 again. Hopefully you like the plan this time.

Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s unique coding competition for school students in collaboration with ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia

The tournament aims to nurture the competitive programming and algorithmic talent among the young programmers, especially among the school students in the states.The contest aims to pick up talented programmers from high school and train them in competititve programming.

There’re 3 rounds, the 3rd one being the final round which is onsite. Those who reach the onsite round, will be eligible to attend the Winter Coding Camp on Competitive programming . Location of the Winter Coding Camp will be Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri. Top teams from each state are invited to attend two days winter coding camp that will coincide with the ICPC Asia Amritapuri Regional Contest held at – Amrita School of Engineering, Amritapuri.
Sessions will be handled by the best problem setters, coders in the country. Best performing team members from ICPC may also teach the young budding coders.

Top 3 teams across the country will be awarded with exciting prizes.

Eligibility- Students up to Classes 12 are eligible to participate in the contest.
Although you can register a college team also but only school students will be invited to onsite rounds. For experienced coders the online round might seem easy.
Registration is mandatory and is fully online here

Hello Everyone!

I recently found an algorithm for finding the primes in O(n) in GeeksforGeeks and it was convincing also and then there is always the Sieve of Eratosthenes running in O(n log log n). The O(n) sieve is however a modification of the normal Sieve of Eratosthenes. But now what happened was that when I implemented the O(n) Sieve it should have run faster than the normal one(at least by a small margin) but it was always slower than the normal Sieve! Can someone please tell me why is it so?

But there a small catch also when we run both the programs for N up to 10^8 the normal sieve is faster by around 0.5 — 0.7 seconds but where as when we give N=10^9 though both takes more memory and time but the O(n) sieve works 0.5 3.0-5.0 seconds faster! so the second question that comes it that, Is the O(n) sieve better for larger numbers only??

PS: The codes I used is the same as shown in the GeeksforGeeks site!

EDIT: we just implemented it on our own and the result for N<=10^8 is the same but the for 10^9 O(n) runs in 12 sec and the normal one runs in 16 sec!!

Hello everyone,

This is my first entry on Codeforces, so please excuse me if there are any mistakes. I know it i quite big but please read before down-voting.

This entry is about the VK Cup Wild Card Round 2. A lot of teams participated in this Round.There was only one problem and it was very interesting. Everyone tried their best to get the maximum score. We also got 21727 points before the system testing but during the system test we got zero points, this is because the solution which the judge considered for system testing was the latest solution with nonzero score and not the best solution which the team submitted! I am not saying it was their mistake in fact it was mentioned in the contest blog but I guess not every team read it properly and so was the case with me.

Now i believe that it becomes unfair sometimes like in our case we submitted many other solution hoping that our score would increase but due to bugs sometimes we got zero points or sometimes a small positive score because the first case was very trivial and in the last phase of the contest we tied to submit some extra solution since the contest was going to end but we couldn't get a better score but we didn't realize that this would cost us a lot! though we had a better solution submitted only our last buggy solution was judged and our rank fell considerably.

Though we participated unofficially it hurt us because we actually tried really hard to get a score of 21727 but at the end when you see that your real solution got rejected and a faulty one was judged anyone would feel very bad.

I am not requesting to change the final standing or anything because that would be too much for a request but it would be really great to see what our best solution could score. So i request MikeMirzayanov to please consider this request and let us know the score our best solution could get!

I am sorry if I offended anyone, it was not my intension at all, i just wanted to put forward this request because it was something that hit hard on our hopes of getting a good rank.

It would be great to know your opinion also!