_parad0x's blog

Private Camps
By _parad0x, history, 5 months ago, In English

Hi everyone, I have seen a lot of gold silver medalists codeforces acc. And I understand that they just use codeforces as contest tool (I mean they not train with codeforces problems). Then I searched how they or from where they actually train, and I found out that they train from their own private camps. Then I searched contests, problems of their camps, but I did not find any of them. If you have link or problems of these camps, would you mind it to share ???

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4 months ago, hide # |
 
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private camps as in like classes or what? There is X-Camp, which has extraordinary classes for USACO bronze ~ plat, but that's the only camp that i've ever attended.

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    4 months ago, hide # ^ |
     
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    No, There is camps in Russia, Romania, Kazakhstan, etc.. that trains olympiad participants. (For example I think there was camp called "Rucode" in Russia). In my country there is no camps, so I asked problems to train myself...

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      4 months ago, hide # ^ |
       
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      I don't know about the exact camps you've mentioned but most training camps just use problems from CF and other websites. Making problems is a lot of work for something that ultimately very few people will see.

      Also these camps are usually more focused on teaching new topics than solving problems in my (admittedly limited) experience.

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        4 months ago, hide # ^ |
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        Indonesia has their official IOI training camp that I participated in, and while yes they do take past problems from random websites rather than entirely making their own new problems (of course they'll never take problems from popular OIs though), the nice part about it is that the quality of the problems are already quite guaranteed to be pretty good since they're already selected by the organizers. It's also definitely not focused on teaching new topics than solving problems, since the way it works is that every single day there is a 5-hour OI-style graded contest on the TLX judge, and by graded I mean that's what decides if you pass into the next stage of the camp. Oh and of course, they don't just take the problem, they reformulate the problem statement in Indonesian, and sometimes they take problems from CF, which obviously wouldn't have subtasks, and make it into an OI-style problem with subtasks by making their own subtasks and tests for them.

        All I'm trying to say here is that while yes indeed they do take their problems from existing sources but some good camps still add something to them which makes the problem worth getting which are, well, the problems are already selected and it might have been problems that are originally not OI but made to be OI by adding subtasks and tests.

        And after having experienced that and after having seen the amazing problems we got on the contests while also of course competing with fellow CPers on OI problems, it really does make me question the same thing, about whether or not there are any collection of OI-style problems from credible training camps that's public, and it does make me want to participate in another competitive programming camp that's similar to what I described but well that's definitely difficult right since the people that can participate in such camps that are actually of good quality are usually only a selective number of people and of course it's not going to be in my own country.

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4 months ago, hide # |
 
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Private camps select problems from public OJs and give their students the list to do. I know one camp that actually sells its problem sets for money.

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