I don't like most editorials

Revision en1, by Negationist, 2024-10-05 22:27:51

Is it just me or do editorials kind of suck? Often, the methods they present are overly complicated and/or not made with idea of improving the reader's intuition in mind. It's gotten to the point that I only look for broad ideas and never look for specific implementation. And I always leave them kind of annoyed.

Example Problem: https://codeforces.me/contest/2008/problem/G (sakurako's task) What I don't like: "Now, we can find where the mexk should be in linear time. Firstly, if it is before the first one, then the answer is k, otherwise, we can assign k=k−a1. Then let's look at the second element. If a1+k<a2, then answer should be a1+k and otherwise we can assign k=k−a2+a1−1. In other words, when we look if our k can be in range from ai to ai+1, we know that number of elements that were not in the array and less than ai equal to k+ai. Then, when we find such i, we can output the answer."

This is dumb and overcomplicated. What they should have said was something like this. "Assume the array is empty, then, mex = k-1. For every array element(0 to n-1) check if mex >= i*GCD. If so, it means the mex is influenced by this array element. Thus we should do mex++. Otherwise do nothing." I went to bed trying to understand the editorial and sleeping frustrated. It seems to me like the tutorial writer care more about showing off then actually developing useful intuition.

I understand making contests and tutorials is hard but still. Some editiorials just seem so disconnected. idk. Anyone else feel this way?

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en1 English Negationist 2024-10-05 22:27:51 1569 Initial revision (published)