abotaha23's blog

By abotaha23, history, 2 years ago, In English

Today is a very special day according to me, because like today a year ago I knew Codeforces; I knew it by coincidence, I was watching a video of someone talking about the Computer Department in our faculty (the department I was interested to enroll in and indeed I have enrolled in it later) and this guy said that you need to practice problem-solving on a website like Codeforces, afterwards I googled it, got to the website and registered on it. I knew nothing back then about online judges and how they work and I still remember my very first submission and how silly I was xD: first I didn't take the input as it is I displayed a message to the judge telling it to give me the input and also I didn't believe the judge when it said w will be between 1 to 100 so I checked that myself in a do-while loop xDxD here is a photo of this submission:

What a year it was! I really gained a lot through it; I entered Codeforces knowing only the basics of programming like for loops, if statements.. and throughout this year I've learned a lot of data structures and algorithms because of Codeforces.

In this year I achieved quite a lot of things that I'm proud of like becoming an expert, solving around 1000 problems and on the above of all of that I had a lot of fun! It is just the beginning I'm really excited to achieve more in the future.

Full text and comments »

  • Vote: I like it
  • +184
  • Vote: I do not like it

By abotaha23, history, 2 years ago, In English

the most thing that was shaping a big block in my way to advance is getting tensioned and stressed during the contests; that would make me not able to solve even the problems that are way easier than my level, I think most of you can relate. So how to overcome this trouble or at least mitigate it so you can do better during the rounds:

  1. Try to imagine the worst-case scenario and how would you deal with it, for instance, how many points will you lose at worst? 100? 200? so what you can compensate them later so why on earth would I tension myself like that.

  2. make some drink (like coffee or tea as you like) to have during the contest that would help, and take a short break (5 minutes or something) in the middle of the contest if needed to have a snack and relax a bit.

  3. watch some streams of top-tier contestants taking part in contests, such as SecondThread, tmwilliamlin168...etc. you'll see that these people are competing at the GM level although, they're so relieved and not stressed at all.

these are the tricks I used to mitigate this catastrophically bad habit and they helped me a lot to improve my performance. if you have any other tricks to handle it, please drop them. wish you all good performance in the upcoming rounds and high ratings.

Full text and comments »

  • Vote: I like it
  • +5
  • Vote: I do not like it

By abotaha23, history, 3 years ago, In English

In problem D of today's round when I opened the submissions I found this solution:

I was surprised that this passed so I copied it and tried to submit it myself. what was really surprising is that it got WA on test 75 as you can see !!!

what was more surprising is that when I opened the solution of the other guy it only passes 67 tests and there are no more tests !! this solution has been considered accepted and it was during the contest you can search the handle and check it yourself the handle is Legend_dy.

can anyone explain what that is ?!

Full text and comments »

  • Vote: I like it
  • +6
  • Vote: I do not like it