Can we roll back the roll back and decrease my rating by 1 so I can participate in this /j

As of the time of this comment, the contest has not yet happened nor has the editorial been publicly released. Are you a time traveler ?

Amazing round. Ty king

Yeah I totally agree with this. English is my mother tongue and still yet I feel like my English skills are inadequate or slow when reading problems. To some degree I would say that reading a Codeforces or other OI problem can be considered a somewhat distinctive skill from reading a novel or a text excerpt (although there is obviously a good amount of correlation between the two).

Plauges is certainly biased given he is defending his claims and himself. Additionally jamesben is a weak case in my opinion. You are correct in that this person was registered two weeks ago around the start of the Huawei challenge and this person actually competed in Huawei challenge (which you did not) as per submissions. I would argue that this person’s account having been created prior to the creation of Plagues’ blog is a sign that they did not create their account solely for the point of arguing with plauges and others (which it seems you did). Additionally, with them having participated in the contest (although i suspect they too are an alt), it seems they would have some stake in alleged cheaters being banned (I don’t know how valid the supposed evidence is, might be solid, might be a nothingburger)given it would improve their own ranking. You however do not seem to have participated in the contest and thus would purely judging on your account history have no stake in whether random people are defined to or not to be cheaters yet you persistently comment about and only about plagues. Thus I think the statements you make (and anyone who didn’t participate in the contest itself) can be seen as attempting to have a neutral view show plauges in a bad light and whether or not that is true, I am uncertain but I think your statement on this should be taken with the same weight as my own points with that being very little.

I’m noticing that your account was created two days ago seemingly lining up exactly with the plauges’ drama and also that all of your comments have been relating to plagues in some way. Is it reasonable to infer that all of your comments will be biased (I’m guessing this is an alt either of plagues or someone he accused) in one way or another whether for or against him?

Is Shakespeare really dead

I will note however that in the western world of computer science, there is a noticeable yet imperfect (as all correlations are) correlation between being good at codeforces and finding success in either the cs work force and or successful startups. Also why is it toxic behavior especially when the change this person is requesting doesn’t negatively impact anyone in any obvious direct way.

Lmaooo I also got WA for A because I returned early as well and spent an absurd amount of time trying to debug it after which my mental fortitude wasn’t strong enough and I gave up after only solving b leading to -150 elo.

This is quite incredible. How long did this proof take to figure out / write?

He could’ve also just created the universe such that he was the greatest informatics Olympiad solver instead of prepping

bro in fact did not make lgm

holy shoots this is brilliant

You solved a ton of problems and I looked at your problems solved graph and it looks very similar to my own but I feel like you don't have to solve that many 800 rated problems, I feel like solving problems at or slightly above your rating would be more beneficial.

segtree rollback

What a fun original and creative title you have! How did you come up with something so revolutionary? As a fellow (former) div 3 farmer I agree that farming div 3 = low skill (hence me).

Another day another GMeric W. I'm going to be taking AP chem this school year and im so fried lmao I can barely understand this :sob: like all I know is entropy is the second law of something and the first law of that thing has to do with conservation of something

I don't think this holds. Lets say wlog we take a person who starts at cell 3, we then move all people on cell 3 right. Person is on cell 4, we then query cell 4 left and that person is on cell 3. Thus the cell that person is on is not monotonic since it can increase and decrease. I think the number of out of bounds positions is monotonic at all times?

Not necessarily, I don't think that personal achievements in a contest should dictate the quality of a contest. I recently did a virtual of 1112 and I think I had a fairly good performance (I didn't bother to impl c and d) but I thought the problems were of somewhat low quality despite doing well personally on this contest. In this contest particular I appreciated how it wasn't a "speedforces" round as much to the problems being more difficult. Also in this contest I don't think I performed nearly as well as I am capable of, I was planning (hoping) to get to 1700 this contest and while yes I didn't drop off too much despite only solving three problems it was still a rather disappointing performance.

I see a *certain renowned problem setter who happens to be a red tester for this round. Looking forward to positive delta for us all on this round

Yeah I was somewhat wondering about this too. It took me like an hour to see it by which time I was unable to code up the solve. I was just looking at the sample cases and somewhat of throwing mental compute at it until a pattern emerged but I can't really see a way to naturally derive it. Perhaps its all in the algebra or you just had to pattern recognize.

Lowk priority queue >>> and also is erase really O(1) cuz I thought you have to go to the pointer then erase so its basically O(logn)?

I disagree. I thought the problem quality was incredible. I personally didn't have the best contest and I know that if I didn't spend time checking the leaderboard I could have solved D and if the contest wasn't 2 hours I could have solved D but nevertheless I overall liked the problems. I somewhat had a false solve for A that costed me around 5 minutes and I think with 5 minutes I could have solved D and gained rating :sob: Second time failing to solve D when 97% done with the problem.

I don't think there was a dp approach to C, I used a priority queue to keep track of optimal ones to use and went from bottom of tower to top to find min at each tower and keep min overall, note that the answer will always be min of that and m since by removing entire tower, it already topples

I would argue that C was a very standard dp problem

Why do you need all those extensions because isn't your main claim to fame on cf cheater catching

Feels like good advice and stuff I heard elsewhere but aren't most construction problems almost a contradiction to your second point or am I just stupid. I agree with the part that weird constraints specifically to eliminate an approach is weird cuz i lowk find it annoying when authors do that (pls stop using n<=1e6 and just use 1e5 pls guys).

Regardless of the value of the sentiment Pigeon had towards solving the problem, I feel like given hes a contest writer, anything he had to say that wasn't in problem should've been either publicly announced, announced solely to testers/coordinators, or not announced at all. I feel like if what he had to say truly didn't have any bearing on the problem, it could've gone into the initial announcement as a small remark however it didn't and instead went to a select group of people

Firstly, N<=1e9 is quite rare and you would never have 1e9 elements in an array given input alone would probably exceed time limit. Secondly if it is used as sort of limit to a value e.g. values of an array a1,a2,a3... am where ai <= 1e9 then iterating over all values of [1,1e9] is rarely (never afaik) the intended solution and would likely require you to do very simple calculations per iteration and idk if anything more than a bitwise operation or two can run and often it would require several operations (and usually not bitwise ones) and thus isn't very practical. But if all condiitons are met, yes as maxrgby said it can be done with a VERY good constant factor.

For at least the ones I checked, they are heurstic problems such that they aren't accepted or WA but rather its scoring based and thus 'finishing' the problem isn't possible as it isn't akin to normal problems that you can clear from the unsolved list. Also you can go into some of the status's for contests and when checking for accepted submissions, I think one of the contests I checked had no accepted verdicts.

Not sure if this is possible cuz I think problems get made at a faster rate than he can solve them reasonably. would be aura tho

Ima keep it a buck, a phone number verification is (in my opinion, obviously different people, different ideas) probably best and while it is a burden on users, so is not being able to get your solutions checked at all and i would argue phone number verification is the lesser evil. Also trying to find a bunch of phone numbers to make a bunch of accounts with is kinda hard but as you said, you don't need more than one and usually people will have access to at least one phone number, and even if you don't i think there are some sites offering temporary phone numbers for free or for very cheap which can deter bot users but make it somewhat reasonable to get one phone number.

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Interesting format. I was wondering are problems in roughly increasing difficulty e.g. if trying to solve a problem from pset 1, would unlocking pset 2 likely unlock an easier problem or one of same difficulty or is it likely to be harder or is just like random ordering or not disclosable how it works.

top 3 mod on usaco server icl. May the odds ever be in your favor

Absolutely amazing contest omg fire job

Wait why did XVIII get banned but Nanyan didn't if we know to a fairly high degree of confidence both are cheaters.

ima keep it a buck, if someone REALLY wants to cheat with ai, if it isn't in person and not online proctored, you can't really tell if they are cheating unless its blatantly obvious. I think from here, rating still has a good amount of meaning as I placed at roughly 900 for trusted users on the last div 3 meaning that assuming all cheaters were cheating to the best of their ability, only AT MAX 10% of the people were cheating which honestly not even that bad and im assuming lower at the upper divs. Additioanlly when considering that only like a couple hundred people ak the contest from trust partiicpants and given the fact ak on this contest wasn't impossible for a div 3 partiicpant (last problem was very solvable), theres probably less than 5% of the people (by my estimates) who are cheating and thus although they may get top spots, the only negative is perhaps rating deflation but I can deal with that to some extent and if your main motivation for cf was rating in the first place, then perhaps playing a video game where there arent cheaters and you can gain ranking and doing cf purely for the fun of solving problems may be in your best interests/

yeah i agree i never found issue in the name of characters but moreso deciphering the problem itself

i don't think it really makes sense to do one every minute because in a situation like a virtual or a contest, lets say you have a big you immediately know how to fix e.g. int to ll and if that occurs, i would be fairly annoyed having to wait a minute.

Very interesting and informative blog. A remark i have is that in my opinion, i do not consider chess and cf a fair comparison. For one, there are many cases in of which one might have a motivation to cheat in cf beyond simply winning, by that i mean as you stated it can be something you can put on a resume whereas in chess one has no exterior motivation for cheating beyond winning. By this, one cheating in chess is for one less likely to happen and also one cheating in chess is likely to very quickly stop. I am or was a fairly avid chess player and i believe i encountered cheaters very rarely and i don't think i ever played a blatant cheater. Your insight at the end was particularly inspiring.

very interesting blog, i remember seeing something like this on a math comp. Hopefully i get to use this in future

become friends with author

unfortunate however i would rather this than ads on sites or costs to competitors. Also very glad they are giving opportunity to opt out which practically makes this neglible for anyone who cares. I wonder if cf will do this in future as they're servers cannot be cheap and im not sure how they are sustaining it

very interesting concept, if there are optimization problems in a div 2/3 for a, the time constraints so easily passible (np passing???) that perhaps this might work in real contest, if n is like 10> and if complexity is something around 2^n or n! this works

no its a reference to a mystical linken post, truly revolutionary stuff

Interesting solution. A potential confounding variable is general improvement in pariticpant disreagrding ai entirely tho. Very cool expeirment to run and potentilly see and very glad to see something from ap stats finally in an actual conversation. orz greateric

I think at this point in time, people who ask for solution and self impl cannot be stopped to any extent unless they screen record or onsite which obviously for cf is not feasible. idk tho

why is greateric on a truly generational run with these blogs

To say that a specialist is always strictly worse than a 2000 in every aspect is pretty absurd.

Do more greedy and constructive problems

I think (not entirely sure) at the moment for these sort of individual problems where you wouldn’t need to cross codebases and files, pro on web interface is better than codex.

Blogs about cheaters are mostly useless. Looking at the scope of things the amount of cheaters is at least in the thousand(s) per contest and I’ve seen blogs show at most like 10 at once.

maybe three months ago you could prove you weren't ai by doing like 2k performance but idk anymore man ai getting too good. Although the burden of proof is upon the person accusing you so all you have to do is disprove the evidence against youy which you seemed to do

He likely would never be top 1. He is brilliant perhaps one of the greatest to live but so are the people who do cp. I’m sure he could make lgm given enough effort. One thing however is he’s getting old and only has so much time to be in peak of mental state. And also CP is not something where you can sit around and ponder a question and eventually wait for something to pop out (skills that research rewards). In thinking fast, he hasn’t showed enough competence to be number one in the world. In competitive math and at imo, something more similar in nature to cp, it took him 3 years to get from bronze to gold. BY any other person’s standards this is incredible and only at 13 however when we compare him to tourist, a person doing cp his whole life, it took him a mere year to get from silver to gold at ioi. Also Terrence is starting awfully late to get good and likely won’t be able to best the progedies who started in like 5th grade, the human mind simply doesn’t work to that extent even someone as great as Tao. Also i think you underestimate how brilliant the people who have held a top 1 spot are. Many of them are nearly as brilliant or possibly more and have decade+ of experience behind them, I find it unlikely Tao could overcome that with a tiny bit more raw intelligence and his math expertise. Nevertheless he would be phenomenal at it and def could hit lgm at some point GIVEN enough effort

I got rid of set and only used sort and that managed to pass. I also think there was a way to remove sets by first storing it in a vector of vectors then later adding it adding precomp of like n but not that much.

As a comment on D, in contest I thought the problem at first glance looked really tedious and still hadn’t solved C so i stuck with C but afterwards I went back to solve D and found it had a really simply idea that was really heavy in implementation. So after i was done and it passed the given cases, i watched it tle (and memory out of bounds lmao) several times. Despite this, I think I learned a lot about it and on like n<=10^6 cases. Much info was gained on optimizations and how to decrease constant factor as my original solution was o(nlogn) (sort,map,set) but i managed to eliminate the map and sets since the values in array were not 10^9 but 10^6 so i could store in an array. Overall fun contest and even though i lowk got rage baited by C’s edge cases, it was a nice contest.

Holy you have one of the craziest problem heat maps i have ever seen

Metacommentary: for the one about three, as kaislash said n%m == 0 is probably a better test in nearly all cases (n < 1e18) since in checking for each digit of n is sum of mult of 3 will firstly still take o(logn) (each digit) time to get the sum but then you also have to recursively figure out if that sum is also a multiple of three which technically works but seems like implement hell. For divisor 4 i guess you could just do (n%100) (to get last 2 digits) then (n%100)%4 == 4 but at that point just do n%4 and atp i think its starting to become clear that using n%x==0 where x is the number testing for division is probably best. Interestingly, there are rules up to like a thousand or so somewhere on the depths of internet if you are really interested in that sort of thing.

Clearly based on rating you are better than me however I feel that I have a converse issue where I cannot do ‘traditional problems’ and can’t really do data structures well (yet) but I’m better at ad hoc and greedy relative to my intuition ability. I think that you probably have a really strong intuition for problems you have seen but perhaps haven’t quite developed your reasoning. I think some igm (pretty sure colingalen) said something like thinking longer when practicing helps develop ability to solve new problems and spending less on each problem but seeing more ideas helps intuition (which you seem to have).

I think usa egoi teams are out there somewhere or perhaps not public

I mean, if they don’t have any data saved on these accounts they can just make a new one right? I mean it sucks but is also an interesting problem ig

Why is akslolcoding testing literally every contest like are there any contest that my guy is actually participating in

Overall really fun contest. Idk somehow missed problem e and slightly messed up calculations for g but fun ideas and such a great number. Yay positive delta

im not expert coder but it honestly depends on difficulty of problem as say for an 800 problem idea may take 10 seconds but the implementation might take 2 minutes whereas a harder problem may take an hour to come up with the idea for but only 10 or so minutes to implement

Unfortunately its a really cheap and lazy way to add another thing to a resume.

Wait how did you solve p2 but not 3 because p1 and p3 were trivial Ngl

How did you solve problem 2

Chromate is bringing up some awfully good arguments. Also aren't the samples just examples of how it could go down and isn't it the responsibility of the user to find edge cases?

If you get enough of these penalties then won’t they wrap around and end up with a very large positive score

I can kinda get what you are saying however this isn’t really a correct experiment since there are two variables (rating and mentioning people at the end) also maybe people aren’t the biggest fans of Taif Uni but IDK.

Moonpole has so much aura

Idk what it is in inches but it’s .00099 miles :)

AperenT for the win

What about I01 2026 and 2027

I would reccomed doing counting and probability on Alcamus on AOPS website, it’s free

Solve problems and see what you get wrong and do more of those problems

Note I appologize for the inconvenience but due to technical difficulties I was not able to get the picture of the brick up on the blog so for today is shall just be tips:(

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Wow that’s so cool

You did like 500 problems so you are probably much better than your rating and likely you just got unlucky

Unfortune I think that in order for people to gain rating someone has to lose rating

This guy knows what’s up

I appreciate your response message being much kinder than the expert guy without as much explicit language. I feel like the way that he wrote made it seem very defensive as if he had something to hide.Furthermore while I do believe that innocent until proven guilty, I felt that Mindeveloped made some darn good points. My own take however do as you will

Don’t worry it is probably ok because the non div 3 people were div 3 once too (probably)

The statement that all experts are cheaters I can say with confidence is not true. Maybe cheating is a problem and I agree but I do not think that it is fair to just based off of someone’s rating to say that they are a cheater without other evidence.

Bro how did you make it this far with that name