AmShZ's blog

By AmShZ, 104 minutes ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another live Math Contest on Repovive!

After two rounds focused on combinatorics, we are expanding the problem set. This time, the contest will feature problems from both Combinatorics and Algebra!

Our goal is to bring the excitement of competitive programming contests to proof-based mathematics. You solve problems, write your proofs, submit them for live judging, and compete on a live leaderboard.

Whether you enjoy clever algebraic ideas or beautiful combinatorial arguments, we hope you will find something interesting in this round!

The contest is rated for everyone.

Rules and judging

The rules are currently the same as in the previous Math Contest. You can read them here:

https://repovive.com/contests/m2/rules

Participants submit written mathematical solutions, which are evaluated by 5 GPT-6 judge agents. Judging remains binary, meaning each submission receives either Accepted or Rejected.

Rejected submissions do not add any extra penalty, and you may make at most 15 submissions per problem. Any use of AI during the contest is prohibited, including for translation. The platform can translate problem statements, and solutions may be written in any language.

We are continuing to improve the judging system based on feedback from previous rounds. If any rules change before the contest, we will announce the changes on the rules page.

We are excited to introduce Algebra into the series alongside Combinatorics, and we hope you enjoy the new mix of problems!

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 6 days ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another Premier round!

Get ready for Repovive Premier Round 9, featuring another set of challenging algorithmic problems.

Please note that this contest will be held on Tuesday.

Premier rounds are currently the highest level among our contest series. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

Prizes

We have a $300 prize pool for this round!

  • 1st place: $100
  • 2nd place: $60
  • 3rd place: $40
  • 5 randomly selected participants from the top 100: $20 each

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD: Thank you for participating! Congratulations to the top 10:

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By AmShZ, history, 12 days ago, In English

Hello everyone!

After the Repovive Math Contest Grand Opening, we are back with our second live math contest!

This round will be entirely about Combinatorics.

Our goal is still the same: to bring the experience of competitive programming contests to proof-based mathematics. You solve a problem, write your proof, submit it, get a live verdict, and compete on a live leaderboard.

The next contest will be Repovive Math Contest Round 1, held this Tuesday.

The contest is rated for everyone.

What changed after the first contest?

After our first math contest, we selected 534 borderline submissions and graded them manually to create a gold standard. We then ran several experiments to understand how we could improve the judging system.

The accuracies shown below are measured specifically on this curated set of difficult and borderline submissions. The accuracy over all contest submissions is higher.

We also experimented with revised judging instructions and few-shot examples, which significantly improved the performance of several models.

You can view the full study here:

https://x.com/ShayanCJahan/status/2106143879200440800

If you have a background in IOI, IMO, ICPC, or similar competitions and are interested in this kind of work, we would also love to hear from you.

Rules and judging

The rules are the same as in the Grand Opening.

You can find the full rules here:

https://repovive.com/contests/1015/rules

If we make any changes before the contest, they will be announced on that page first.

As before, participants submit written mathematical solutions. Rejected submissions do not add any extra penalty, and each participant may make at most 15 submissions per problem. Your penalty is the time of your last accepted submission, with each minute counting as 1 negative point.

Any use of AI during the contest is strictly prohibited, including for translation. The platform itself can translate problem statements, and solutions may be written in any language.

For this round, the judge will still return a binary verdict: each submission is either Accepted or Rejected. Each solution is evaluated by 5 GPT-6 judge agents.

We do not necessarily consider binary judging the final form of the system. We are actively experimenting with better ways to provide more informative and useful judging in future rounds without revealing information about the solution during the contest.

We learned a lot from the first contest, both from the submissions and from the feedback we received afterward. This round is another step toward making live proof-based math contests work as smoothly and competitively as possible.

We hope you join us this Tuesday!

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 2 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Standard round is here.

Repovive Standard Round 8 will be held this Sunday.

Standard rounds are intended to be close to Codeforces Div.2 level. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for participants whose role is Steak or below. It is unrated for Lobsters.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 2 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We recently held the first Math Contest on Repovive, and it was a really interesting experience. You could genuinely feel people's excitement about trying something new, and we also had many very strong participants from Japan. I really love the Japanese competitive programming community!

You can check out the contest here: https://repovive.com/contests/math-round-1

Also, Um_nik, Golovanov399, and maspy made videos about their participation in the contest, which was really cool to see!

For those who did not follow the original announcement, each written solution was evaluated by 5 GPT 6 judge agents. The judging was binary: your solution was either Accepted or Rejected. Rejected submissions had no penalty, but you had at most 15 submissions per problem.

Since the contest ended, we have received a lot of feedback. Based on what people told us, the judge was probably a little too strict about details. A solution with the correct main idea could still be rejected if an important step was not explained sufficiently. I still think having no penalty for rejected submissions was the right decision, because it would not be very fair to penalize someone simply because they did not know how much detail the judge expected.

I want to discuss two of the most important points from the feedback and hear what you think.

1. What should the verdict system look like?

If we keep binary judging, I think rejected submissions should continue to have no penalty. Participants do not initially know how detailed their solution needs to be, and writing and resubmitting a proof can already take a significant amount of contest time. More importantly, when a submission is rejected, we currently give no feedback about why it was rejected. So I do not think adding another penalty on top of that would improve the contest.

However, one of the most common pieces of feedback was: why use binary judging at all? Why not use something similar to IMO grading, such as a score from 0 to 7?

There are two main reasons we did not do this. First, creating a good partial scoring rubric is difficult. A mathematical problem may have many completely different solutions and many different partially correct approaches, and it is nearly impossible to predict all of them before the contest and decide exactly how many points every possible amount of progress should receive. In a traditional olympiad, graders can read the submitted solutions, discover new approaches, discuss them, and adapt the marking scheme. In a live contest, the score has to be produced immediately.

The second problem is that partial scores can leak information about the solution. Suppose you have a conjecture but are not sure whether it is correct. You submit an incomplete argument based on it and receive a high partial score. Now you have learned that your direction is probably correct. Even if the grading rubric is hidden, the score itself can act as a hint.

physics0523 suggested an interesting middle ground: instead of only Accepted and Rejected, we could distinguish between a solution being rejected because it is incorrect and being rejected because it is not detailed enough. This would effectively give us three verdicts. I like the idea, but even this can leak information. If you have an uncertain conjecture, you could submit an incomplete proof and see whether the judge calls it incorrect or merely incomplete. Maybe there are ways to limit this, but it is still something we have to consider.

So I am curious: what kind of verdict system would you prefer in a live math contest? Binary judging with no penalty? Partial scores? A third verdict for insufficient detail? Or something else?

2. How much detail should a solution require?

This might actually be the harder question. How detailed should a written solution be before we accept it? Even as a human grader, I am not sure I can describe the exact boundary perfectly.

Obviously, participants should not need to explain every trivial algebraic manipulation or completely standard step. On the other hand, simply stating the main observation without explaining why it proves the result should probably not be enough. The difficult part is deciding where exactly the boundary lies. When is a missing step routine enough that a grader can safely infer it, and when is it an essential part of the proof that must be written explicitly?

This becomes especially important in a live contest. If the judge is too strict, participants may spend too much of the contest writing formal details instead of solving problems. If it is too lenient, incomplete arguments may get accepted.

So this is the second question I would really like to discuss: if you were grading these solutions, how would you define the minimum level of detail required for an Accepted verdict?

This was our first attempt at this format, so we definitely expect the judging system and rules to evolve. The experiment was really interesting for us, and the feedback we received has already been extremely useful.

I would love to hear your thoughts, especially from people who participated in the round.

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By AmShZ, 3 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

Have you ever wished that math and combinatorics problems had the same live contest experience as competitive programming?

We have, so we are building exactly that on Repovive!

After beta testing our new Math section, we are ready to host the Repovive Math Contest Grand Opening.

You can already try our beta math problems here: https://repovive.com/problems/math

The theme of our first contest will be Combinatorics. The round will contain 5 combinatorics problems to be solved in 2 hours and 30 minutes. The problem set is intended to be suitable for a wide range of levels, so everyone is welcome to participate.

The contest is rated for everyone.

Since this is the first large live test of this format, we would especially love to have you participate, try the judging system, and share your feedback afterward.

Prizes

We have an $800 prize pool for the grand opening!

  • 1st place: $250
  • 2nd place: $150
  • 3rd place: $100

There are also additional prizes:

  • First Accept: $25 for the first accepted solution on each of the 5 problems
  • Random Top 100: 4 participants from the top 100 will receive $25 each
  • Random Participant: 3 participants from the contest will receive $25 each

Rules

  • This is a mathematical problem solving contest. No programming is required.
  • You submit a written solution for each problem.
  • Your penalty is the time of your last accepted submission. Each minute counts as 1 negative point.
  • Wrong submissions do not add any extra penalty.
  • You may make at most 15 submissions per problem.
  • Your goal is to get as many problems accepted as possible within the contest.
  • Any use of AI is strictly prohibited, including using AI for translation.
  • The platform can translate problem statements into different languages for you.
  • You may write your solution in any language. The judging system supports solutions written in different languages.

How judging works

Instead of a traditional code judge, your written mathematical solutions will be evaluated by 5 GPT 6 judges.

You can write your proof and reasoning directly in text. The judges check whether your submitted solution correctly solves the problem.

Judging is completely binary. There is no partial score. Each submission is either Accepted or Rejected.

LLM based judging for mathematical reasoning has also been studied academically. For some background on the strengths and limitations of this approach, you can read the paper From Calculation to Adjudication: Examining LLM Judges on Mathematical Reasoning Tasks.

This contest is also an experiment for us. We want to see how well a live competitive format for mathematical problem solving can work, both technically and competitively.

We would really appreciate your participation and feedback.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to all prize winners!

$250 first place: yusa kimura (fact493)

$150 second place: Kosuke Kaneshita (potato167)

$100 third place: 1434

$25 First Accept prizes

One prize for each problem:

$25 Random Top 100 prizes

Four winners:

$25 Random Participant prizes

Three winners:

That's $800 in total prizes. Random winners were drawn from all contestants who submitted during the round.

Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to everyone who took part in our first Math contest!

Winners, keep an eye on your email inbox for instructions on receiving your prize.

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By AmShZ, history, 3 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 9 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 4 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another Premier round!

Get ready for Repovive Premier Round 8, featuring another set of challenging algorithmic problems.

Please note that this contest starts at an unusual time. Make sure to check the start time carefully.

Premier rounds are currently the highest level among our contest series. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

Prizes

The top participants will receive:

  • 1st place: $100
  • 2nd place: $60
  • 3rd place: $40

Additionally, 5 participants from the top 100 will each receive $20.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

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By AmShZ, 5 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 8 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

Please note that the start time of this contest is unusual, so make sure to check it carefully.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 6 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Standard round is here.

Repovive Standard Round 7 will be held this Sunday.

Standard rounds are intended to be close to Codeforces Div.2 level. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 7 weeks ago, In English

In recent years, IOI tasks have taken a different direction. Communication, interactive, and constructive tasks have become much more common. In some of these tasks, there is no fixed optimal answer to the problem. Instead, contestants receive points depending on how small or large a certain value is.

In this blog, I want to criticize this style of task from a few different angles and express my concern that it is starting to appear too often at IOI.

My first point is about the ideas behind the solutions.

I think the solutions to these tasks can be extremely creative, and this is certainly a good thing. There may be no clear or standard path toward solving the problem. Each contestant can come up with their own idea, implement it, and possibly receive a good score. This freedom can make such tasks very interesting.

However, I often feel that these solutions do not have enough depth.

You may try a somewhat random idea and suddenly receive a very good score. Or you may start with an ordinary solution, make a small modification that improves the answer by a factor of two, and immediately gain many more points. Constant-factor improvements can play a surprisingly large role.

Because of this, these tasks sometimes start to feel more like heuristic contests. Personally, I do not think this is a good direction for OI contests.

My second criticism is about subtasks and score distribution.

In many of these problems, your score depends on how much you manage to optimize your solution. The lack of depth I mentioned above becomes even more important here. Dividing some bound by two, or even making an $$$O(1)$$$ change to the code, may suddenly give you several dozen additional points.

Sometimes the subtasks almost seem to say: do more tedious work and receive more points.

In a standard batch problem, each subtask usually represents a meaningful special case of the original problem. By solving it, you may discover an important part of the structure or get closer to the main observation. Each subtask has its own intended meaning, and the progression toward the full solution feels more natural and reliable.

I am not against the existence of communication tasks. Some of them have very beautiful and creative ideas, and having an occasional task of this kind adds variety to the contest.

My concern is simply that they are being used too often.

At least from what I see, students are becoming less interested in sitting with a problem and thinking deeply until they discover its complete structure. Instead, they look for another small optimization and another few points. I feel that the old problem-solving mindset is slowly becoming less visible, and I miss it.

I would be interested to hear what others think. Do you also feel that IOI is using too many tasks of this style, or do you think this is a good direction for the competition?

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By AmShZ, 7 weeks ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 7 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 2 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another Premier round!

Repovive Premier Round 7 will be held this Sunday.

Premier rounds are currently the highest level among our contest series. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

Prizes

The top participants will receive:

  • 1st place: $100
  • 2nd place: $60
  • 3rd place: $40

Additionally, 5 participants from the top 100 will each receive $20.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 6 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

The Codeforces handles of the top 10 participants:

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Standard round is here.

Repovive Standard Round 6 will be held this Monday.

Standard rounds are intended to be close to Codeforces Div.2 level. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: The contest has been postponed by one day and will now be held on Monday at the same time.

UPD2: Congratulations to the top participants:

The Codeforces handles of the top 10 participants:

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 5 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below 1700, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

The Codeforces handles of the top 10 participants:

Those of you who tested the contest: manya.verma21

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another Premier round!

Repovive Premier Round 6 will be held this Saturday.

Premier rounds are currently the highest level among our contest series. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: We are sorry for the issues during the contest.

The website was down for around $$$5$$$ to $$$10$$$ minutes. Also, in Problem E, we forgot to mention the constraint on the sum of $$$k$$$ over test cases. We apologize for these problems.

You can now view the solutions in the Learn tab.

Congratulations to the top participants:

We would also like to thank AmiraliRafiei, Thrb_73, and jigyasu_kalyan for testing the round.

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are starting a new series on Repovive: Weekly Challenges.

In each weekly challenge, we will release problems for 7 consecutive days. After each problem is released, you will have 24 hours to get it accepted. Penalty does not matter.

There will be a live ranking throughout the challenge. The goal of these challenges is both competition and learning, so try not to miss any day!

Next week, from Monday to Sunday, the topic will be Approximation.

For Week 1, we will release two independent problems each day: one Easy problem and one Hard problem. These two problems are separate tasks, so the Hard problem is not necessarily a harder version of the Easy problem.

In this style of problems, we usually have an optimization problem, but you do not need to find the optimal answer. It is enough to construct a solution with a guaranteed approximation factor specified in the statement. In many cases, finding the exact optimum is either not accepted or much harder than what is expected.

The problems this week are not intended to be extremely difficult. The main goal is to introduce this interesting style of problems and make it more familiar to participants.

If the reception is good, we will continue this type of challenge in the future.

We hope you enjoy the challenge!

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By AmShZ, 3 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 4 will be held this Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

The Codeforces handles of the top 10 participants:

Those of you who tested the contest in advance: AKprinceofpersia, Thrb_73, nimoxide, Siyah, AmiraliRafiei and _Robi.

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By AmShZ, 4 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Standard round is here.

Repovive Standard Round 5 will be held on Monday.

Standard rounds are intended to be close to Codeforces Div.2 level. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: The contest has been postponed by one day, from Sunday to Monday.

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By AmShZ, 4 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are opening a Call for Tasks for upcoming Repovive contests.

Repovive is a competitive programming platform that regularly hosts Starter, Standard, and Premier rounds. We are looking for original and high-quality problems from the community.

We especially welcome complete contest proposals, since having a full set with a consistent difficulty curve usually leads to a better contest. However, submitting a single task is also completely fine.

You can submit your proposal here: https://repovive.com/proposals/contest

After submitting a proposal, we will contact you and provide feedback within at most 3 days. If the proposal is accepted, the payment will be made immediately according to the payment structure below.

What kind of tasks are we looking for?

We are interested in problems with clean ideas, short and natural statements, and solutions where the main difficulty is algorithmic thinking.

In general, we prefer tasks that are:

  • original and unpublished;
  • not implementation-heavy without a strong idea;
  • easy to understand after reading the statement;
  • backed by a clear intended solution.

When submitting a task, please include the statement idea, intended solution, expected difficulty, and any important observations. If you are submitting a full contest, please submit the tasks as a set with their intended slots.

Payment structure

The following amounts are our current rewards for accepted tasks, depending on the final position and difficulty of the problem.

Problem Premier rounds Standard rounds
A $7 $5
B $10 $7
C $20 $10
D $30 $20
E $45 $30
F $75 $45
G $100 $75

The final position of a task may be adjusted during preparation, and the reward will be based on the position where the task is finally used.

These amounts may be updated over time, and we will announce any changes in advance.

The authors of accepted tasks will be shown on the page of each problem. For example, you can see the author section on this task.

We are looking forward to seeing your ideas!

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By AmShZ, history, 4 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

We are back with another Premier round!

Repovive Premier Round 5 will be held this Sunday.

Premier rounds are currently the highest level among our contest series. We hope you enjoy it!

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: We apologize for the short issue that the website had for around $$$5$$$ minutes during the contest. Thank you for your patience.

You can now view the solutions in the Learn tab.

Congratulations to the top participants:

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By AmShZ, 4 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 3 will be held next Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

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By AmShZ, 4 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Standard round is here.

Repovive Standard Round 4 will be held next Wednesday.

The contest is rated for everyone.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Fortunately, the contest went smoothly without any issues. You can now view the solutions on the problem page.

Congratulations to the top participants:

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By AmShZ, 5 months ago, In English

Hello everyone!

The next Starter round is here.

Repovive Starter Round 2 will be held next Sunday.

Starter rounds are designed to be beginner-friendly, with a level close to Codeforces Div.3 / AtCoder ABC.

The contest is rated for participants with rating below $$$1700$$$, whose role is at most Sushi Roll. It is unrated for Steaks.

See you on the leaderboard!

UPD1: Congratulations to the top participants:

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