Hello Codeforces!
Undoubtedly, you should check editorial if you can't cope with the task for a long time. But I'm wondering how important is reading it after you solved some problem yourself. As for me, I usually look through editorial, if I couldn't manage with the task in ~30-40 minutes or if I wrote some heavy implementation to check if there was some easier approach. In 70% of cases my solution is very like the author's one, but sometimes there is a pretty different idea, and it's great to learn some other methods which can be used in this task.
What's your opinion about it?
Auto comment: topic has been updated by cute_hater (previous revision, new revision, compare).
I like to read them. If the author's solution is the same as yours, it's very quick to read, so you only end up investing time if there's something new there.
Totally agree.
I feel like there's just as much to learn from reading editorials/discussions if you've solved a problem as there is if you haven't solved it. The worst part is that you may waste time by reading something that you already know. However, most often the amount of time you lose is insignificant. The best part is that you may find out about gems such as this.
Moreover, you can also improve your implementation tool chain by looking at other people's code. When training, I used to look at the shortest solutions after solving a problem, to look for various implementation tricks that made it easier than mine. This might not work on Codeforces, though, as I expect that most of the shortest solutions are C++ two-liners written by 'golf coders' that are a pain to understand.
I could try to write up a tool that would try to find interesting short solutions to problems that are not two-liners. Let me know if you guys would be interested in that.
oBviously interested!