TL;DR: I shuffled the array, got 100 points, and have no idea why.
(every instance of BOI here refers to the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics.)
I was working on BOI23 d1p2 yesterday, and came up with the following solution for 50 pts:
Here, there were 2 obvious optimizations:
Since I only need the value of $$$\min(b, c)$$$ if $$$\min(a, c) = \min(a, b)$$$, we can throw out some unnecessary queries
Might as well randomize the array since it might reduce such occurrences, idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And to my surprise...it got 100 points!
Looking at the official code, this seems to be the intended solution. However, even after thinking on it, I'm not really sure why it works. Why is shuffling the array so effective? (only applying optimization 1 without 2 gets you 58 points.)