Goal Around October this year, I decided to try to get to the top 1% of every single thing I cared about in the following year. It was around this time that I started becoming interested in Competitive Programming. I'd used Code Forces before for some classes, but I never did any contests or problems outside of that. I figured now was a good time to start, as CF would be the most measurable outcome of all of my different goals.

Based on this graph: https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/131886, I estimate the top 1% of CodeForces participants to be around 2150 in rating. As such, my goal for about the next 10 months is to reach Master (orange).

Many of you might wonder if this is even possible. My belief that anyone motivated can achieve this is based on these following blog posts. https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/141560 (Master in a year) https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/145502 (IOI vs CF performance). Based on my knowledge of the time taken by several IOI and USACO Platinum competitors, I assumed the inverse relationship would hold for their predictive effect on CF rating. Effort from these participants ranged from 300-800 hours of deliberate practice. Due to my lacking mathematical background, I will take the higher end estimate of 800 hours as my reference point.

Here is a table of my goals on a month by month basis for rating.

Month Rating November 1350 December 1500 January 1600 February 1700 March 1800 April 1875 May 1950 June 2000 July 2050 August 2100 September 2150 October 2200

Strategy My strategy is to solve 50 recent problems of every rating from 1400-1700. 75 recent problems from 1800-2000. 100 recent problems from 2100-2200. I am planning to frontload a large swath of this in the first few months to try to get to expert early, so I have more time to focus on the more grueling grind 1700+. I have finished the Competitive Programmers Handbook in the last 2 weeks, but I will start going through it chapter by chapter again to drill the necessary algorithms based on when they start to become common. I intend to participate in as many competitions as possible to get quick feedback on the effectiveness of my methods. My main issues currently are overthinking problems and trying to use DFS/DSA on low rated problems. Resolving this issue and gaining intuition for finding patterns in problems will be a major hurdle to overcome.

Here is my analysis for the prevalence of numerous topics on when they become a non-insignificant part of competitions based on tag distribution at each rating: https://cf-ladder-pro.vercel.app/

Topic Rating Greedy 800+ Math 800+ Constructive 800+ Brute Force 800+ Implementation 800+ Binary Search 1100+ Sortings 800+ Bitmasks 1300+ DP 1200+ Number Theory 1300+ Strings 800+ Data Structures 1400+ Two Pointers 1400+ Graphs 1500+ DFS and similar 1500+ Combinatorics 1700+ Trees 1700+ DSU 1900+ Shortest Path 1900+ Divide and Conquer 2200+ Probabilities Uncommon (1800+) Divide and Conquer Uncommon (1800+) Geometry Uncommon (1600+) Games Uncommon (1700+) Interactive Uncommon (1700+) Hashing Uncommon (1700+)

Improvements In general, this plan is probably riddled with many flaws. I would need to get advice from many other more experienced CPers to shore up some of the issues with this plan. If you have any advice or would like to share your advice, please do so. I will use any help I can to try to achieve such an ambitious goal.