Your contest was awesome. Problem C was a great introduction for me (an absolute beginner) to DFS. I learned something new today. Your effort is greatly appreciated, thank you!

B: I noticed a pattern from the provided input->output examples that the result is just the sum of the difference between each element and the element before it but only if the element before it has a higher value, plus the final element — 1.

C: Just always pick the minimum element in the array as x. Always. The number of times it takes for all elements in the array to equal each other is equal to the number of times it takes for the maximum element to get to the minimum element with the given equation.

So, I did just that. Stored the minimum element and the maximum element, and then made a while loop that does the operation with a counter.

Solved C but couldn't solve B because I forgot to use long long instead of int and somehow missed that as I was staring at my screen for an hour. It hurts so much... :(

Oh well... We live and we learn! I'm new at this so there's so much for me to learn, including the absolute basics lol.