Recently I've been seeing more and more constructive problems and I was wondering if that is a good or a bad thing.
Firstly what problems are included in the type of constructive. They are the ones that require you to come up with a solution to satisfy some constraint. Usually there is no hint in the statement for how to do that and often the solution comes by trying a bunch of random things. This definition is very vague so I think to form a better idea we should look at some examples.
Before that I must say why I think they are invaluable and why I like them so much. Because they show what the human brain is capable of, and unleashes it's creativity because they don't involve any standard algorithm. By solving a lot of them you will improve your pattern recognition which will help in a lot of different areas.
Now some problems with 1400 — 1600 difficulty
I really liked the solution to this problem: https://codeforces.net/problemset/problem/1517/C
I think interactives are inherently constructives: https://codeforces.net/contest/1698/problem/D
These were all the problems I could think of right now.
Feel free to suggest some nice constructive problems and also don't forget to say if you either like or hate this type tasks. (I think there is no in between)
I love constructive problems. Every time whenever I solve a nice constructive problem during a contest, I feel a different kind of joy that can't be expressed in words.
That was a constructive reply.
ConStRuCtiVeS are SeXy
Not too big of a fan of them, mostly because I feel like if i seen them once i won’t really see them again, especially the “given a binary string let me invent two random operations you can do”. It also comes down too how fast you get the one observation in most cases, which can also be sometimes rng and trial and error for lower rated people while tbh for most of the top rated guys it’s just intuition.
I don't like them because their solutions are often akin to magic and only make sense with constrained reasoning specific to that task.
The observations by themselves feel nonsensical but when put together nicely solve the problem.
I really don't think constructive problems require as much "trying random things" as people say it does. I challenge anyone here to give me a constructive that's less than 2700, that I need to "guess random thing" to solve.
Indeed, it makes my stress increase because i feel like i consumed too much time to solve only one task. And, i end up watching the tutorial on youtube and feeling bad when not comming up the solutions like that.
constructive problems improves observation skills which are useful even in other types of problems.