Hello all, I am a 15 year old student in Singapore, and one of my biggest dreams is to qualify to participate in the IOI, if not, get a medal in it. I know a lot of you are probably looking at my grey handle and questioning this goal but I am never going to give up and I study quite a lot for it. But anyways — because of this — I have a few questions of how IOI questions compare to the questions on CodeForces.
Are the type of questions that you get in IOI similar to the ones you get on CodeForces? Or is there a subset of problems in CodeForces that are similar to the IOI? Do you get more Ad Hoc questions, or more algorithm + data structure intensive questions? Are there more array questions? Graph questions? Permutations and Combinations? I am looking for more of a general answer for this, i.e. If they appear not at all, rarely, frequently, or all the time.
If the types of questions that you get in IOI and CodeForces are comparable, what would the rating distribution of questions be of the 3 questions you get over 1 day (5 hours) (if it were in a CodeForces contest). Also, what would be the lowest ranking on CodeForces to be able to solve these questions within the 5 hours. For example would a high yellow coder be able to do well in IOI?
I am asking the above two questions as if CodeForces is a good website to prepare for IOI, I can assign myself goals in CodeForces that would help me achieve in IOI. For example if my CodeForces rating is a good way to measure how well I would do in IOI, I can focus on improving my CodeForces rating and solving CodeForces questions.
However, if CodeForces is not a good website, or there is a better one:
What would be the best website to test my problem solving skills on? I want a website with questions which have a similar difficulty and type to the questions that one would get in the IOI.
What would be the best books or articles or videos (basically anything) that you recommend for me to read/watch to learn advanced algorithms and data structure's as well as advanced problem solving. I want a book that is challenging and has a target audience of advanced competitive programmers. Note, I am currently reading cp4 book 1 by Steven and Felix Halim.
Thank you so much for answering these questions (you don't have to answer them all, maybe just one would be greatly appreciated.) I would go through IOI past papers to answer these questions myself but unfortunately I don't have enough experience to figure out the underlying concept in questions or the intended solutions by the problem author. Thanks for helping!
