For roughly the next couple hours I’ll be expert. I don’t plan on doing any contests soon so this will the the only time in next couple month’s ill be expert. Pls don’t roll back next contests. W cf for doing rollback i suppose

Kevin114514 is very orz and won ioi! After my own country (US) the main person I wanted to win was Qiwen or "kevin". After the first day, things were looking somewhat grim but nevertheless he somehow made the nearly 70pt comeback to win it all. Was this unexpected? Eh, I feel like of all the people to win ioi, I would've bet money on him given he has nearly 500 peak elo on all the other contestants but I digress. Interesting things I observed, there was some dude from vietnam, Phuc, who was one of four people to solve p1 on day one despite only getting 204 place overall which show crazy levels of deep knowledge into a specific question type. Also cool to see two americans getting t20 (likely gold) and just being absolute orzists. ANother thing that was fascinating was China "only" (if you can even say that) had 3 golds as opposed to 4 last year. Fun ioi! (not that I was there lol).

Yknow,Even though my past three contests have been fairly lucky, getting to blue (the real blue as opposed to the “fake” light blue according to strongeric) still feels quite fulfilling even though it is just a number stored on a database somewhere subject to being wiped in seconds by a solar flare but I digress. I supposed ill tell a somehwat interesting story. So actually when i first started cf, that was after i had learned some dsa (from usaco guide orz orz orz benqi). So thus doing so, i had completed all the modules from bronze-gold and new all the data structures to a fairly high extent and thus i thought i would be at least like 1500 (my ego thought surely i would be higher than 1500) rating right? Nope, wrong wrong wrong. On my first contest i solved a big fat 1 problem correctly/ This placed me at 418 which isn’t very good if i do say so myself. I then waited another like 6 months before running another contest at which point i was getting roughly 10000 place and garnering roughly 1000 perf. Not great isn’t it? Eventually i somehow picked up some knowledge and started getting slightly better places and this summer i had somewhat of a lockin and kinda started getting 1200+ elo then 1400ish and now my past three contests have all been blue perf which is really cool and thus made me a blue coder.

Some advice i have for people <light blue (or cyan as per greateric): -Solving tons of problems does not necessarily make you better. I solved like 30 800 problems over the course of 3 hours and i can confidently tell you i learned almost nothing (if you are around 800 elo you should solve 800 level problems though). Solving tons of problems close to or slightly higher than your rating makes you better (usually). -You do not need to know (insert niche data structure) to make it to cyan or blue. I don’t think i used binary search more than 5 times in contest on cf. I’ve actually seen a usage for a segtree that wouldve solved a problem a couple times so maybe fenwick tree is worth learning but even then idk. You could probably get by on maybe prefix sums,binary search, and some tree stuff and make it to candidate master. Overall I would say if you haven’t seen a data structure used more than once in practicing around your level, you probably don’t need to know how to use it. -You learn more from problems you cannot solve than ones you do. Someone signifigantly better at cp than me said you should aim for roughly 30-40% solve rate in practice. -Talking about cp does not make you better at cp. I learned this one the hard way. -Making blogs about cp does not make you better at cp. I am learning this one the hard way. -Doing cp makes you better at cp. I will learn this the hard way.

Also this is the last time i will be the same color as highest person on my friends list so yayy

Also to cat, euc, fate, bit, atri. Mitp, I’m pretty sure i was ahead of you at least one point in the last contest so ggs? Also i think i beat everyone here except fate in a contest so ggs again?

Also thx to the usaco server (i hope to join gf server soon pls let me in im only like 248 away) for giving me tons of good and bad advice and being somewhat of a reason why i continued with this nonsense.

Sorry my bad english, i hope to improve it soon.

Hello codenforcers. I hope you all are having a wonderful day. For those of you who downvoted my previous post, I appreciate the constructive criticism and will not engage in such clownery moving forward. Anyway here is my next tip is that when looking at certain problems that do not have an extremely tight time complexity, you can often go with suboptimal little additions that make the code significantly easier. I think that my example of this is going to be just sometimes making extra array or vector that you can use to call back to other information later which may of course differ from the intended solution and might be slower but often in many of the easier problems you will not be very close to the time limit so you should be fine. Also remember to not be close to MLE either. Take this how you will. Of course I would like to add a very nice photo of a brick :)

Welcome to my first blog. I’m calling it tips and bricks because tips and tricks is a bit cliche. My first tip is that just keep solving problems. My first brick was when I was trying to shoot from half court and it bricked so hard on the rim :(.