Hello everyone!

As a person who had two horrible contest, I found a common trend in both rounds. It was due to lack of good samples me believing something that felt obvious but in reality is just wrong. And I wonder, how can I avoid these mistakes in the future.

Some obvious answer, that I usually try do to on the contest, if I struggle, is stress-testing. It's a really useful tool which can really help with either finding small wrong test cases or checking some assumptions about the problem. But sometimes you can't just stress test, because I am not able to bruteforce all matrices or some other object with just absurd number of combinations. So there aren't always dumb solutions which are easy to code and somewhat efficient.

If so, then how often do you usually overcheck the assumptions that you do? I can't write down every step of my solution, as it takes too much time and after a while I'm just left confused on the mess that I've written (even though I use a tablet and technically have infinite board), but I also can't trust in every idea which comes to me (even if it feels obvious, sometimes)

May you share some ideas? Thanks in advance