I had a brief conversation with stevenwjy and fonmagnus some days ago regarding whether algorithms used in Competitive Programming are commonly used, or at all used in industries. Their respond were, if I remember correctly and I wish I am not misquoting them, “Mostly not used at all and for some algorithms might be best suit in certain industries meaning you might need to use segment tree in trading (?) but not software engineering.” And I understand their respond, in industry, the challenges are different from competitive programming thus requiring different techniques and approaches to solve them.

Looking at machine learning for example, I see that most of the algorithms and data structure used in CP are absent, and the algorithm/technique that are used in ML like Gradient Descent and Linear Regression is not used in CP at all. Even if Dynamic Programming is used, it is slightly different than what we use in CP. I initially felt devastated at first but at the end I understood that they are totally two different fields requiring different experties.

However I am not sure with the other fields in computer science. Which field do you think has the most similarity with CP? Can you mention where each cp techniques are used in other fields?

I am not by any mean trying to say that competitive programming is useless like some people out there. Certainly it has it own merits specifically in building intuition and improving problem solving skill which certainly help in solving real world problems.