Hello there,↵
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This is my first blog, which is about making mistakes and learning from them. Hopefully it will be of use to someone.↵
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#### Be careful with accumulate!↵
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Last competition was one of my worst performances ever [contest:1983]. It wasn't obvious to me how to solve B so I skipped it and started working on C which I thought is pretty straightforward. I ended up submitting 9 wrong submissions on C and wasting almost all my time on it.↵
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It turns out that all my submissions were correct aside from one little nasty bug. I used the function "accumulate" to sum values in a vector of long longs but it turns out that accumulate sums them as ints instead of long longs...↵
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Here is my first submission for C [submission:269261777] and here's a submission I made after the contest that got AC [submission:269299787]. You may notice that the only difference is in the accumulate function.↵
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#### What to do after such a mistake?↵
There's really only one thing that can be done after such a mistake. Suck it up and learn from it.↵
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#### Rating↵
I used to care a lot about my rating, which is why I started conditioning myself to not care about it as much. Of course, I still do care about my rating and caring about one's rating can be a good motivator for improvement. However I believe that caring a little too much can certainly be detrimental. In this case, it is much easier for me to learn from this mistake than it would've been had I not started trying to not care as much. Also, caring too much about my rating could prevent me from making mistakes from which I could learn.↵
↵
#### Stop caring about rating. Care about being good.↵
The way I started caring less about rating is that I participated pretty much in every contest despite the circumstances. Visiting a friends house for a few days? I can do a contest. Not feeling prepared at all? Doesn't really matter, still can learn from the contest. Being ill (happened this time)? Same thing. Having a completely foreign setup (pc,mouse,keyboard,editor)? Improve, adapt, overcome.↵
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I do wonder whether I'm not taking it too far as there are cases where I'm pretty sure that I'm going to lose rating and I participate regardless. Maybe not participating and just doing a virtual contest later would have a similar effect while preserving rating. However, I feel that from the competitions where the conditions are most unfriendly, I learn the most.↵
↵
↵
tl;dr: Cope↵
↵
↵
↵
↵
This is my first blog, which is about making mistakes and learning from them. Hopefully it will be of use to someone.↵
↵
#### Be careful with accumulate!↵
↵
Last competition was one of my worst performances ever [contest:1983]. It wasn't obvious to me how to solve B so I skipped it and started working on C which I thought is pretty straightforward. I ended up submitting 9 wrong submissions on C and wasting almost all my time on it.↵
↵
It turns out that all my submissions were correct aside from one little nasty bug. I used the function "accumulate" to sum values in a vector of long longs but it turns out that accumulate sums them as ints instead of long longs...↵
↵
Here is my first submission for C [submission:269261777] and here's a submission I made after the contest that got AC [submission:269299787]. You may notice that the only difference is in the accumulate function.↵
↵
#### What to do after such a mistake?↵
There's really only one thing that can be done after such a mistake. Suck it up and learn from it.↵
↵
#### Rating↵
I used to care a lot about my rating, which is why I started conditioning myself to not care about it as much. Of course, I still do care about my rating and caring about one's rating can be a good motivator for improvement. However I believe that caring a little too much can certainly be detrimental. In this case, it is much easier for me to learn from this mistake than it would've been had I not started trying to not care as much. Also, caring too much about my rating could prevent me from making mistakes from which I could learn.↵
↵
#### Stop caring about rating. Care about being good.↵
The way I started caring less about rating is that I participated pretty much in every contest despite the circumstances. Visiting a friends house for a few days? I can do a contest. Not feeling prepared at all? Doesn't really matter, still can learn from the contest. Being ill (happened this time)? Same thing. Having a completely foreign setup (pc,mouse,keyboard,editor)? Improve, adapt, overcome.↵
↵
I do wonder whether I'm not taking it too far as there are cases where I'm pretty sure that I'm going to lose rating and I participate regardless. Maybe not participating and just doing a virtual contest later would have a similar effect while preserving rating. However, I feel that from the competitions where the conditions are most unfriendly, I learn the most.↵
↵
↵
tl;dr: Cope↵
↵
↵
↵
