What It Felt Like to Be Purple for Less Than 24 Hours

Hello, Codeforces!

I remember a day last year when there was a contest scheduled at an unusual time, right in the middle of my school day. That day, I left school early and went home to participate in the contest.

During that contest, I solved A-C at a good pace. At minute 38, I submitted a solution for D that was logically correct, with integer overflow being its only issue. (I usually had #define int int64_t in my code, but I had removed it in that particular submission.)

However, after eventually finding the bug and getting D accepted (which took quite a while), I lost my motivation and couldn't properly focus on the remaining problems. I believe that if this hadn't happened, I would have been fully capable of solving the entirety of E during the contest. (Later that same day, after the contest, when I was in a calmer state of mind, I solved it very quickly.) That would have given me the rank I needed to reach CM in that round.

(If you're interested, here's the contest:

Codeforces Round 1078 (Div. 2))

And finally, in Codeforces Round 1132 (Div. 2), I managed to reach the CM rating!

A lot happened in Iran during this period, and there were several long stretches when I had stopped studying altogether.

Eventually, after about nine months, I finally made it to CM.

But! In the very next contest, Codeforces Round 1133 (Div. 1), which took place the day immediately after I became a CM (and also the day before I started writing this blog), I managed to get rank 500, or 12th from the bottom. This resulted in a Pupil performance and almost completely reversed the progress I'd made just one day earlier, when I had climbed up with a +95 rating change, only to drop back down with a -75.

In this contest, I ran into a relatively obvious edge case in problem A, which caused me to get it accepted at minute 23 instead of minute 11, and without any wrong submissions.

For problem B, I didn't handle the cases properly in my DP, and my code got WA2 when there were many consecutive numbers.

And finally, my solution for problem C had an issue when L<=2, which I only noticed after the contest when I looked at the first few test cases of test 2.

And yes! This was a contest in which I might have achieved a good rank if I had been at my best. Instead, I participated when I was at my worst, and ended up dropping back down once again.

It's true that my time as a CM lasted less than 24 hours, and I even ended up at exactly 1900 rating (though I will probably go a bit higher after the rating rollback).

I still sometimes regret not spending more time studying during those periods when finding the time and opportunities to practice CP was harder than ever in Iran. But that doesn't mean I should get stuck in the past or stop moving forward.

I'll keep doing my best to reach this level again and hopefully participate in more rated Div. 1 contests. :)