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Just Promoted to Specialist!
I got very lucky with some of the questions from the last contest, and I was promoted to Specialist which I'm quite happy about.
Especially question C, I'm not sure from where, but something about the problem rang a bell and I managed to quite quickly figure out that I only need to test substrings of length up to 3.
I suppose the next step is to keep practising and work towards achieving expert rank, and I hope by then I will maybe have the skills and practice to have a good chance at promoting to USACO Gold in December. Fingers crossed.
I aim to participate in a rated contest maybe once a week, but because of my time zone, it's quite hard to participate without murdering my sleep schedule. I did try question E, but it was an enlightening experience to see the comments discussing the question after the contest, mentioning algorithms that I had never even heard of. Goes to show how much there is to learn!
There's no real point to this post, just trying out the blog feature mostly.