+1.......struggling from the same problem

Me second. My problem-solving abilities are often instinctive, which is to say my directions when solving problems relies on guesses on the first sight. This limits my abilities to solve harder/ad-hoc problems (combined algorithms or logic), and I've not progressed for months because of this. So to all the masters and strong-thinkers out there, can anyone please recommend me how to get pass this obstacle? Have a nice day.

I will share an observation, about how I reached till here, people say to practice and practice. And in a way it is true, but I will share how I practiced.

I chose problems bwn 1500 — 1700 level and practiced. I observed that if you distribute the number of problems solved according to the rating range then your rating(approx.) = corresponding rating of the median of max problem solved count + [100 , 200] , although I observed it for me and my friends, whose rating are in the range 1500-1700, I believe this might hold for higher ratings too.

So , I would suggest (Which i am doing myself now) is to practice problems in the rating range [x-200,y+100] where x = your current rating and y = your desired rating.

How do we solve a new problem? We remember some similar problem we have already solved before and try to solve new one same way. But if you want to improve your skill, then you have to forget about old solutions and find out all different ways of how new problem can be solved. In other words, do not stop thinking after problem solved some way, but find other ways to solve the problem.

I am still following my old path of thinking.

Are you sure of it? I often feel like this, but then I go back to some problems which I failed to solve before, but now I am able to solve. The change in thinking is often so slow that you don't feel it.

Conclusions I drew from a blog entry. a couple of days ago.

Practice on problems close to your maximum problems under contest.

I still think speed is relevant, so find the problem level you can solve like 3 or 4 within an hour. The Filter on the problemset page is great for that. It also helped me rising my focus time.

Try solving a single question in various ways. Even when you solve a good question by yourself, you should check other's solution and editorial and in many cases you will learn a more efficient way to solve that problem. This thing helped me to grow. This is important because in a contest,you don't have to just solve the problem you need to solve them as quickly as you can.

Hello please give me some suggestion that how should i increase my typing speed and also i am facing difficulty in solving dp questions .Please suggest me some editorials or books , i have read many questions but i have to see the solution , i myself wont be able to implement them .

learning classical algorithms and then using it to solve problems boost confidence and gives new direction of thinking . dividing time proportionally in learning theory and solving problems is the key . participating on different sites can also be helpful .

Watch Anime and Listen to Twice.

The most important step in creative problem solving is making observations about the problem. When you solve a problem, take pen and paper and scribble down as many interesting properties of the problem as possible. Play around with different inputs and see if you can find a pattern in them. Note down any particularly strange problem constraints (example: some number is always odd). Usually, the answer can be found in some combination of these observations. See if you can simplify the problem to a more solvable form by applying any of the observations (example: some function is monotonic, I can use binary search, now the problem is how I can check the answer quickly).

Of course, solving more problems will help you improve your way of thinking. In this case, I suggest trying hard problems for long periods of time (1-2 weeks) without reading editorials (something I struggle a lot with myself). Hard problems are where you really challenge your thinking, and even if you don't actually solve the problem, doing it over a longer period of time encourages you to play around with a lot of things in the problem, and even if some of them are not useful for this problem they may be useful for some other problems.

Of course, every problem is different, and a method of thinking that works well on some problems may not work well on others. In that case, don't get discouraged. Maybe the editorial uses some really magical observation, or the problem turns out to be something like "HLD with convex hull in segment tree" (aka classic technique spam). In that case, try to reason to yourself on how you can feasibly reach the magic observation, or split the problem into parts which can be done with classic techniques.

Hope that helped!

Solve problems without looking for editorial or any help. Do this for some period of time.

You can see that I got the expert tag from a newbie tag in just 2 months. I believe the thing helped me a lot is to try to solve a problem by my own idea then look at the editorial and see how others solve the problem.. I spent time until I can feel their idea in my heart. Interesting fact is now I can think a lot deeper and getting more solution approach than 2 months past me [ Sometimes I can't believe that I didn't a idea for a simple problem two months ago]. I hope this way of learning could you to think deeper and to get variety ideas :)

During my time in quarantine, I have practiced quite some problems, and I can happily say that I am improving, really happy with my rating graph. So what I've observed with my problem-solving abilities (not the though process) in the past few months, is that I'm comfortably able solve mostly those problems, which I have solved before. And the most important part I felt was, thinking about the 'what could have been' of the problem. Learning the data structures is important but what's more important is to think about all of their applications. To be honest, most of everything I've learned is from reading tutorials. I don't believe that my brain is fast enough to learn something and extend that concept to all its applications and apply them in a contest straight away, but I can surely do that if I just keep doing problems on that concept. A quite recent example of this was the Problem D in the Educational Round 87. I saw the problem and instantly binary lifting on fenwick tree came to my mind (after 1 wrong submission, because I didnt pay attention to memory limits, dumb me). It's been too long since I saw a problem based on binary lifting, but I did practice on it, when I first learned about it. I mostly speak for problems C,D (or E) of Div2 contests, that the more you know about some concept(data structure and algorithms) and the more familiarity you have with it, will make you progress. Eventually most of the problems will then seem like 'Hey, I have done this before, it's easy'.

Thank all of you for all the extremely helpful responses. The responses I've got during these few days have helped me to learn many good practices and habits. I really appreciate your help, and again, I wish all of you a good day.

Wow, you have improved really quickly =)) Congrats upon reaching 2000!

After Writing the post I think you have improved a lot( seeing your increased rating just within few weeks) by the valuable suggestions which you got here.Kindly will you share some suggestions which you got and that really helped you and some additional suggestions according to your experience.