About an hour before the round, a friend told me that there was a Div. 2 today. So out of pure boredom, I decided to participate, because why not. I was 20 points away from CM, and if I just solve A,B,C,D, I shouldn't lose any rating.

So I bought a large coffee, and got to work. I solved A,B,C in 10 minutes and then I started working on D. It took me 27 minutes, a long time considering how simple the solution was, but I kept going. Then I started solving E1. It took me a while to get to the correct observation, and even longer to implement it with all the bugs I was getting. But I kept going. Eventually I solved it.

Now I was really excited. E2 seemed impossible at first, but then I was able to cheese it with a bitset solution. But not before getting a wrong answer because I forgot to make the bitset bigger after debugging.

Despite all of these mistakes, I was still top 20 (top 10 if you consider trusted participants). And imagine how high I would have been if I didn't make those mistakes.

It felt like I was on top of the world. I can't describe how it feels to finally be CM after all these years. I skipped F because it looked really hard, so I started chilling until I saw an announcement that made my stomach drop:

Unfortunately, it was discovered only now that the statement was missing an important condition. The correct statement should include the line "The operation 2 can only be applied at most once." The statement will be corrected soon.

We believe this issue affected many participants of this round, and therefore we have to declare this round unrated. We sincerely apologize for this mistake.

All that hard work, all the stars that had to align, all the keystrokes I entered into my laptop, was a waste of time and effort. Why do I even bother? What's the point of it all?

According to Carrot, I would have gained 156 points if those 3 words were in the statement.

I understand some people were affected by this and had their rating drop, but why should I be deprived of points too?

I suggest making the round rated for people with nonnegative deltas. It's only fair to others and myself who have to put up with newbies who don't even know what a 2D array is copy code from some Indian streamer on telegram.