Hey,

It's been a while since I last made a blog, mostly due to university really ramping up the intensity and having to move into a new place. I couldn't make it to a bunch of rounds due to mandatory practicals or had to be late and lost rating, but I have finally managed to break past gray rank.

In general, this round went really smoothly for me. It felt like all the solutions to the questions from A-D came naturally, and I was able to implement them quickly after working through the problems for a few minutes. Although for A, I tried to come up with some efficient algorithm at first, but then I realized that it's the first problem of a div. 3 and just bruteforced it. I had around an hour and a half to solve any of the problems E-G, however, it didn't go too well. For E, I thought that it's most likely DP and sliding window for finding the correct rows, but I couldn't think of any way to implement it, as you would have to consider at most 2*10^5 cases for each recursive step, which seemed way too slow, so after a good while, I just gave up and moved to the next question. For question F, I misread the problem statement and just skipped it, cause I thought it was way too difficult, which was a big mistake, since F was probably the easiest to figure out of the three. Lastly, I attempted G, however, I made a very slow algorithm without grouping, so it had no chance at passing the tests. Moreover, for some reason I was having a lot of issues with vectors and arrays, as they seemingly sometimes would return incorrect data, so I spent a good chunk of time just trying to get the program to run correctly on the test case, until I settled on just making global arrays and filling them with -1 after each test case. I felt a bit disappointed that I couldn't solve any of the three, but in the end, I went through A-D quickly, so I was still happy regardless.

All in all, I can definitely see myself improving over time after participating in the contests. I can find solutions to problems faster than before and I'm able to consistently solve Div 2 A-B in the first hour. It feels like a big step to finally break through 1200 rating, because it seemed impossible at first, but after a lot of practice, it has finally been done. I'm looking forward to reaching cyan in the near future and then working my way towards expert.

Lastly, one final note about the previous AtCoder Regular contest on Sunday: I was expecting something like div. 2 from CF, but I couldn't solve even one problem. I looked at the standings, and only around 30% of people solved at least one problem, so 70% of all participants got 0 score. After looking at the editorials, the solution for A seemed not intuitive at all — I don't get how you were supposed to see that you need binary search for problem A. The contest just felt like 2 hours of banging my head against a wall, seemingly getting closer to the solution, but in the end, going in the wrong direction. I'm probably just way too low level for the regular contests. But hey, at least I tried it.

Well then, 'til the next contest!