I tried to solve "1611E1 — Escape The Maze (easy version)" using approach of traversing from friends up (parents) and from root (Vlad) down (to leaves) and at the same time. When friends visit some node I mark it as visited and that prevents Vlad to traverse through that node down. This approach gives me incorrect solution and I don't know why. Any ideas? Submission: https://codeforces.me/contest/1611/submission/136924541

Just a bit of background, I'm married and I have a baby now, so besides that is no that much free time for me. I'm spending around 5 hours weekly on CP, either practicing problems or competing.

I don't know why I find it fun, I was always interested in many areas of IT, but algorithms and data structures especially. When I solve a hard problem or score good at competition I feel quite excited. It seems to me that I'll do CP as hobby for a lifetime, even in 30 years :-). But even with my hobbies I want to see a progress, to get better over time, it's not fun for me if I'm stagnating. Also, I think that CP helps also a lot to any software engineer to better approach any problem and understand software performance. Also, it is good general mental exercise I suppose.

Why you do CP?

32 years old, started a year ago. From my rank you can see I still suck :-), but slowly getting better. I'm a software developer/architect and working on software development professionally for more than 15 years, but cp is much different. I started cp as part of preparation for interviews, but then continued since its fun. How far I will push it I cannot say, but I also strive to become grandmaster :-)