butterflies's blog

By butterflies, history, 15 months ago, In English
starlightps.org

Hi Codeforces!

Are you struggling with practicing effectively? Maybe you are having issues with using key insights from previous problems you solved in new problems? (Note: multiple top problem solvers like Geothermal (CF international grandmaster, top 0.02%) recommend reflecting on key ideas/observations 💡 after solving problems in order to be able to tackle new problems.)

Thus, I have created this platform called 🌠 Starlight Problem Solving to help people improve:

  • 🙋 You can share and view a summary of insights (thanks to AI) on over 20,000 problems (Codeforces, AtCoder, DMOJ, etc). This allows you to see new important insights you may be missing on finding.
  • 🔍 You can also view similar problems based on insights (thanks to AI) so if you couldn't solve a problem, you can now find similar problems to allow you to master the insight(s) you struggled with.
  • 🤔 You can also see hints to spend more time with hands on problem solving.
  • 🏗 In the future, we hope to create an AI to predict key insights problems (including ones with no insights in this database) and use AI to summarize the key insights needed to achieve a certain level (e.g. USA computing olympiad gold, codeforces rating 1900) since problem solving skills in addition to algorithms is needed.

If this sounds like it would be useful, please consider joining the website. Let as many people know as possible (links of text to copy in share the message) as we likely NEED data on MANY TYPES of problems. Use the JOURNAL FEATURE which stores all the insights of problems you solved! We are working to add the feature to help import your spreadsheets of insights for your practice to the journal to make it more convenient!

Join the website → starlightps.org

30 day problem solving challenge (win up to $100)

We're doing a 30 day problem solving challenge where one lucky winner will get an Amazon gift card worth up to $100. The prize depends on participation, so please share this challenge. To qualify, you must solve at least 15 problems and post at least one insight/hint for each. More information here: https://starlightps.org/about/challenge/.

We are working to add the feature to help import your spreadsheets of insights for your practice, so we may extend the deadline.

💬 Join the community:

Join the Discord server: https://discord.gg/czgReQSpFz to share your input on how to improve this project/features to add!

🌐 Share this message:

Markdown format of various ads, as well as a short text add, and an image promoting starlight are all available at https://tinyurl.com/starlightps-ads. All available under CC BY 4.0.

👐 Join the project (volunteer, open source)!

We are currently open source on GitHub: https://github.com/bkf2020. Licensed under AGPLv3.

Here is a Google Form to fill out with your qualifications if you are interested: https://forms.gle/txpWvcZwWxD1yVog6. I'm looking for machine learning engineers, web developers, web designers, and marketing/outreach.

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15 months ago, # |
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Bumping for more visibility. Join the website here: https://starlightps.org.

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15 months ago, # |
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This sounds like an interesting project! I'm curious how the AI portion of this will work. Are you planning on using a CP-specific reskin of ChatGPT (which I suspect is what a lot of companies do when they use AI) or will you be training your own model?

If it's the former, how will you deal with ChatGPT's "hallucinations"? One of the CP servers I'm in was recently making fun of ChatGPT for suggesting an obviously wrong data structure for a problem that's explained with very little flavortext. How will you prevent your AI from providing misleading or outright incorrect insights?

If it's the latter, how will you be collecting the training data? I can't claim to be an expert on AI/ML, but my understanding is that you need a decent amount of data for an accurate model. It might be difficult to collect data for some of the harder problems. For example, USACO Gold has around 1000 participants (plus around 500 if you add Platinum). Even if each one of them provides an insight for each problem, that doesn't seem like a lot.

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    15 months ago, # ^ |
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    Some friends and I tried analyzing cp problems with chatgpt. I found that first querying it to simplify statement then asking query with simplified statement to consider some specific paths when thinking of solution (intial motivation for making list of insights in my practice guide) worked decently well if you play with prompts long enough. I could get chatgpt to give major insights into many USACO gold level problems (since they have very small subsets of directions to think as far as solution path and you just ask it to give insights on related to each one you come up with ahead of time).

    I hope someone else might try harder on this idea, I am too lazy for now.

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    15 months ago, # ^ |
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    Right now I am planning on using Sentence Transformers from UKPLab to group similar insights/hints together for each problem (this provides a summary) and to group similar insights over ALL problems to determine which problems are similar.

    In the future, I do plan on using some kind of GPT model to PREDICT the insights of a problem. I think to summarize the key insights needed for a certain level, we can use the GPT model to predict the insights of problems over recent years and then use Sentence Transformers to summarize the insights needed. However, I obviously haven't fully developed this yet and will need more talented people to help!

    I think it's fair to say we cannot expect GPT or any AI model to be perfect in predicting insights/summarizing for a certain level but I think after people solve/read the editorial, they can figure out if the insights given make some sense. Still, I think it's useful that people can check the key insights needed to achieve their goals in competitive programming (and find problems given those insights) to give them more direction over what problems they should practice with and what they should be trying to learn from each problem.

    Lastly, I think regardless of GPT or whatever AI we need, we will still need a good amount of data. I'm aiming to get thousands of insights in the system but we currently only have around 90 users. I've tried advertising this on various discord servers and posted on AoPS as well. Please post any feedback on how we can get this project to reach more people/how we can improve the blogposts.

    Thanks for the comment and your interest in this project!

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15 months ago, # |
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I think this is a very good idea, and would be great to analyze how many similar insights are put when you have multiple people creating lists similar to what I did in my practice guide (I suspect there are only an extremely small set of fundamental concepts you have to think to solve 99% of cp problems).

I wanted my free students to do this in a github and was going to do an AI project with it but they have been too lazy >:(.

However, if you want more people to use the website, I think you should focus on a smaller subset of problems that are easier to get to so when people go to a problem they don't always see "no other comments" yet. For example, focus on getting people to put insights for the most recent usaco problems and each new cf round that comes out.

Also give some incentive or motivate some people to consistently put insights whenever they solve problems (turn it into personal solution bank organizer, pay small money to some people who update enough problems idk).

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    15 months ago, # ^ |
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    I will try to get people to post insights for the most recent USACO problems on discord/reddit. Another thing that may help is for someone to repost this blogpost with a higher rated account, but I don't really expect that to happen...

    Also this website comes with a Journal so you can see the insights needed for each problem you solved.

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15 months ago, # |
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Hi all it would be very helpful if you can post the hints/insights for the 9 problems in the new pinely round 2. Thanks! We'll try to get the problems available soon after the contest.

By the way, we are also planning a gift card giveway to people posting insights to a certain number of problems, so stay tuned for that!

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    15 months ago, # ^ |
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    It would also be helpful to post hints/insights for the 6/7 problems in the new Educational Codeforces Round 154 (Rated for Div. 2). Thanks!

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    14 months ago, # ^ |
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    It would also be helpful to post hints/insights for the 6/7 problems in the new Educational Codeforces Round 897 (Div. 2). Thanks!

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15 months ago, # |
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We're doing a 30 day problem solving challenge where one lucky winner will get a giftup worth up to $100. The prize depends on participation, so please share this challenge. To qualify, you must solve at least 15 problems and post at least one insight/hint for each. More information here: https://starlightps.org/about/challenge/.

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15 months ago, # |
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14 months ago, # |
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We're doing a 30 day problem solving challenge where one lucky winner will get a giftup worth up to $100. The prize depends on participation, so please share this challenge. To qualify, you must solve at least 15 problems and post at least one insight/hint for each. More information here: https://starlightps.org/about/challenge/.

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