I'm afraid that I don't know the answer to that question.

Only limited by your imagination and hard work, but based on my experience, I'd say 1800-1900 is a reasonable goal to have.

I don't really use keyboard switches — just my laptop keyboard for competitive programming suffices :)

Consistent practice, plus lots of perseverance and thinking time. And once you solve a problem, try to internalize the steps you took so that you can solve other problems in a similar manner. Maybe you'd like to read this blog.

I'm not sure what IIT-D is. /s

See this. Or any of the multiple blogs on how to practice in the catalog.

Doesn't matter what platform you're using (at least didn't matter for me). Any website with a good number of educational problems on a variety of topics works (for instance, Codeforces, CSES, Timus, AtCoder and CodeChef).

Soon

0

As an AI language model, I don't have the ability to answer your query regarding why users on Codeforces are diverse and quite aggressive.

Which textbook are you using? On a more serious note, there is no one way to improve your skills — what works for someone might not work for others. I wrote a blog on my perspective on learning, perhaps that might help you understand what isn't working for you.

Be friends with authors, interact with others in the community — I don't know of other ways, unfortunately.

A XNOR B = (A NOR (A NOR B)) NOR (B NOR (B NOR A))

I believe solving more problems just outside your comfort zone has the potential to fix both these issues.

If you want a favourite colour, then probably blue/red. Unfortunately IGM is dark red on CF, if it was light pink as on certain Discord servers, it would have been a better contender.

newbie things

Depends a lot from person to person, one really has to experiment to understand what works the best for them. I personally prefer reading books and solving problems over watching videos, because there is more deep content and you can play around with ideas much more easily with them. I am not aware of any sheets for training that work for everyone or any specific routine that works for everyone, you might want to read other blogs about people's personal experiences. If you really want a "track" laid out for you, multiple blogs about how to practice are here.

Hi! As an AI language model, I can not verify the veracity of your claim.

why do you have a bojack horseman pfp

how much does a dog run?

He will say "Nor"

For my favourite competitive programming problems, I'll have to look up my past solved problems, but in general I enjoy problems that involve cool ideas or are challenging for me (in the sense that they force me to look at the problem from multiple perspectives). One of the more memorable problems that I liked was 1503F - Сбалансируйте карты, that I first encountered while testing that round.

I've talked about it here earlier. Another reason is that contests don't fit my schedule, while you can write blogs/comments any time. About your second question, no, I do not care about my rating/title.

If I get the time and motivation to do so, sure. For a more detailed answer, you can refer to this comment.

What I did was read books and blogs on C++, and watch cppcon talks. Of course, there's nothing better than learning a language while using it though.

This is a question I should be asking you in your AMA :)

Why kill Quantum Bogosort?

NOR gate is a universal gate.

What worked for me was to be decent at math and know basic stuff like dp, binary search, greedy, a bit of graphs and basic data structures like segment trees. Though with the meta now, I guess the list of prerequisites might be smaller.

Can't think of any, I guess I am satisfied in how things worked out for me.

Don't interact with cheaters if it affects you that much. Focus on improving yourself, turning to cheating will more often than not lead to consequences, not to mention the guilt and lack of self-confidence that might arise out of it. Rating is just a number on the internet, it doesn't define your self-worth.

no need to worry about cheaters. Because Heap_OverFlow will catch them

I won't say frequently, but sometimes. In a job, it depends on what kind of work you're doing. For instance, if your job involves implementing anything close to a programming language, you will find trees in the form of abstract syntax trees, and graph theory (flow graphs, dominator tree etc.) is quite ubiquitous in that field. However, in any job, you should be able to apply critical thinking that you can develop during competitive programming.

nor

I just try to do my best, though nowhere near good for a lot of things.

1. Depends a lot — based on my experience in uni, TF/Keras is faster to work with (less setup time), but PyTorch makes it easier to be flexible. I'd prefer the former if I had to come up with something quick and dirty, but the latter if I want to do something much more seriously over a longer period of time.
2. Read a lot of well-written books (famously well-written books can be found for every topic if you search for them on MSE or MO). And make it a habit to read Wikipedia pages on math and follow links to the references, without being afraid of reading papers, googling stuff along the way (probably the best habits you can develop if you want to learn new theory). The reason I suggest Wikipedia is that it gives a bird's-eye view of the topic and the connections to other topics, and it's a great starting point to understand what kind of theory exists in the first place.

Whenever I get the time and feel like writing a blog. I have 5-6 blog ideas sitting in my drafts for anywhere from a month to a year, and most of them are either very vast (completely new theory — for CF, at least — that can be used in competitive programming) or too niche (for instance, ear decomposition of matroids).

You can refer to this comment. TL;DR: not in the foreseeable future, though if I get the motivation to do so, I will do so.

Currently I am working as a quant, but won't disclose the name of the company because I don't want to be doxxed.

when

When reading a book or a paper, I try to read it with an open mind in all generality, and keep all my doubts for the end, while actively trying to draw parallels from what I already know and have intuition about. Thinking about examples helps internalize the ideas presented in the book/paper.

It is quite important to re-read the content in case it is technical, because authors often write books/papers in multiple iterations, adding some more detail at various parts of the text, and unwrapping those iterations leads to different insights that a single reading might not be able to uncover.

Also, refer to alternative resources in case something is unclear. Try to not be stuck at one point, because it will make you lose motivation rapidly.

I've also written a bit on this topic in this blog, under the heading "How learning can look like for you" — maybe it'll help too.

This and this are some well-documented ways on how to approach reading books and papers, that I concur with.

Listening to music, reading on interesting stuff, and solving problems. I used to play instruments and compose music but haven't done the latter for a long time now. The same goes for dabbling with Linux (obligatory I use Arch btw) and writing my own tools.

You can refer to this.

Decent but overrated. /s

Consciously try to get everything right on the first go. For instance, try proving that your code is correct with invariants. For stress testing, I don't really do a lot of things during contests, just random max tests and enumerating all small tests.

By being at peace.

For getting better at contests, yes (my rating increased a lot when I was doing virtual contests regularly). Though for developing problem solving skills, maybe not as much as untimed problem solving.

I find it hard to list out everything I did to reach the "level" I am at right now, assuming you're asking about intellectual development. I started doing higher math quite early on out of my own volition, without a teacher or a guide as such, so it might be hard to relate to my experience. I did read a lot of math books, and referred to Wikipedia a lot. This was before I got to know about Olympiads, and I believe a lot of my mental growth was positively impacted by doing math, physics and related Olympiads. I believe you can learn stuff from any resource — you could imagine an ignorant 10 year old typing "good free maths books" into a search engine without knowing what he is getting into, and that worked out for me just fine.

Regarding specific books, you might want to browse for specific recommendations in places where there are people better read than me, like math stack exchange for math, or AoPS for olympiads. I believe that the one thing that helped me a lot was that I liked reading books a lot, because it was fun to look at how different people explained the same thing. In that sense, it would be unfair to attribute stuff to just a few resources that I used. A specific resource I can't recommend enough for academic pursuits is Wikipedia — don't listen to teachers parroting the same "Wikipedia is evil" narrative; the math and science side of Wikipedia (and the whole site in general) are too strict to allow misinformation to pass, and if you really don't trust Wikipedia, read the references.

I started competitive programming (in the sense of learning a couple of things) close to the end of 2018 or the beginning of 2019. But I started taking it at least semi-seriously in mid 2019. I've been doing a job for a year or so.

I had the chance to, but I passed on it about 5 years ago.

Because $$$A \overline{\lor} B$$$ is true iff neither $$$A$$$ is true nor $$$B$$$ is true.

To build intuition about correct things, you should first know what constitutes a correct thing, and how you can be sure that the thing is correct. This is a nice book on proofs, and understanding why things work in the book should be a nice exercise.

Now that you know what a proof is, and what correctness is, you are in the right frame of mind to build intuition (wrong intuition is worse than no intuition). Now try to solve problems (from any source you like), starting from easy to hard. Document the process (either mentally or with pen and paper). Ask yourself questions like did you guess the solution and prove its correctness, or did you build on it step by step? Both approaches are valid if you can show they're correct, intuition is part of what will help you make these kinds of choices fast. There is no good way to build intuition other than to have an idea of why things work, and that comes only from interacting with similar things. At this point, I believe it is a good idea to read this blog.

I have a few books that I started out with, and I feel that they're somewhat decent. They may or may not work for you, but they were quite popular in the math olympiad community when I did MO. Here's the list of books, in the order that I remember starting doing them (or at least the order that I remember):

• Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics
• Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience
• Problem Primer for the Olympiad
• The Art and Craft of Problem Solving
• Problem Solving Strategies
• Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective
• How to Solve It

There are a ton of other advanced books, but I believe those will probably be overwhelming if not done in the right order, unless you have a voracious appetite for reading and solving problems. I omitted some advanced books that I started alongside these books for the same reason. If you run out of problems, you might want to browse this website (don't navigate through the courses, but the forums for problems and the wikis for resources). For more bite-sized problems and informational content, you might want to refer to this website — it has a great collection of interesting problems with multiple solutions.