Hi everyone, I became grandmaster today so I decided to go down memory lane and review every problem I have ever done in a CodeForces contest to look back and see every technique and algorithm I had to use to become a grandmaster. I am not sure how useful this is, I mostly think it's fun to look at all the old solutions I wrote and how different it was from how I write code now. I think the main takeaway is that, as many people have said before, you don't need to know or memorize a bunch of advanced algorithms to become grandmaster. As you will see, there are many popular algorithms that I have never needed in a CodeForces contest despite being a grandmaster. There are also many problems where I just say I use "ad hoc reasoning," meaning there's not a standard technique I used to solve the problem and you just need to make some clever mathematical observations to solve the problem.
This isn't to say that learning algorithms is bad—I love reading cp-algorithms.com and learning new algorithms—but for the purpose of getting better at competitive programming, at least on CodeForces, practicing consistently and getting better and better at your general problem-solving abilities matters much more.
CodeForces Round #362 (Div. 2): Rating went from 1500 to 1504 (back then, default rating was 1500 instead of 0)
Codeforces Round #363 (Div. 2): Rating went from 1504 to 1536 (+36)
- Problem A: Brute force
- Problem B: Brute force
- Problem C: Ad hoc reasoning and basic bitmasks (there is a dynamic programming solution, but that's not how I solved it)
Codeforces Round #553 (Div. 2): Rating went from 1540 to 1566 (+26)
- Problem A: Brute force
- Problem B: Brute force and bitwise operations
- Problem C: Ad hoc reasoning and math
Codeforces Round #570 (Div. 3): Rating went from 1566 to 1732 (+166)
- Problem A: Basic number theory
- Problem B: Ad hoc reasoning and math
- Problem C: Ad hoc reasoning and math
- Problem D: Greedy and priority queue
- Problem E: Ad hoc reasoning with strings (there is a BFS solution, but that's not how I solved it)
- Problem H: Dynamic programming (I used the count unique subsequences of a given length algorithm)
Educational CodeForces Round 68: Rating went from 1732 to 1766 (+44)
- Problem A: Ad hoc reasoning and math
- Problem B: Brute force and row/column sums
- Problem C: Ad hoc reasoning with strings and subsequences
- Problem D: Game theory
CodeForces Global Round 4: Rating went from 1776 to 1807 (+31)
- Problem A: Greedy
- Problem B: Dynamic programming
- Problem C: Binary exponentiation
- Problem D: Ad hoc reasoning with graphs
- Problem E: Deques
Educational Codeforces Round 74: Rating went from 1807 to 1920 (+113)
