Ahmed_Morsy's blog

Usaco
By Ahmed_Morsy, 10 years ago, In English

Some people recommend solving on usaco for ioier's so i wanted to ask if this really helps . if you have any experience share it please :) .

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10 years ago, # |
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Well I think usaco is quite nice for starters and learning the most famous algorithms. Me myself started it but got bored and stopped halfway through. It is, however, quite good for beginning. If you think the problems are quite challenging for you, then sure you will imorove your skills by solving them. That holds for any problems you can find around the web.

About IOI exactly, today's IOI problems are of quite a different style than usaco. However don't be too concentrated on "I must be good at IOI and IOI only". Of course shortly before IOI it's good to solve problems from past IOIs, but if throughout the year you do decent results in codeforces/topcoder/usaco/codechef/etc, chances are you will do nice in the IOI too!

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10 years ago, # |
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How much should I stay with a problem before checking hints or solution online ??

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    Quite unrelated to the post but anyway,

    It really depends, I've been to Petr's lecture and he got asked exactly that question. He wasn't really sure, and couldn't give any exact answer but he said about 2 hours. My opinion is that if you have some ideas and believe you may solve it, give it some more time. If you are in a total block, meaning for at least 2 hours you have no ideas you can work on, then I guess reading the solution is good as it may turn out you will learn something new :)

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