Hey there CF fam! I just became Pupil in the last contest and couldn't solve problem C. After the contest I saw that it could've been solved by DP. DP is my weakest topic. In all of the contests I have given, I have never been able to solve a single dp problem. I have practiced many problems on Leetcode and few on CF as well but I still feel lost whenever I see a dp problem. I looked up several blogs on CF and Leetcode and have solved several of the problems from the suggested lists(I was able to solve those maybe because I knew in advance that this will be solved by dp) but still can't feel even slightly confident about DP problems in general. Have you guys ever faced this problem? Can any of you help me out with this?
Although I am a newbie but I have studied topics like dp, graphs, segment trees, DSU, etc and have solved problems based on these on Leetcode(mostly) and on CF as well. Just because of my bad contest temperament and weakness in DP, I am not able to go beyond problem C in any div2 contest.
Auto comment: topic has been updated by AJ_Forces (previous revision, new revision, compare).
First of all, congrats for reaching pupil. Usually div 2 C are usually some construction or some greedy/math. You rarely need DP to solve C. As many things in CP, dp is learned through doing, if you really want to get good at dp, solve some basic dp problems and maybe some harder ones, CSES dp section has some very good and fun dp problems. Also at the beginning I have seen a lot of beginners have an easier time with top down dp so try doing that. From personal experience there is a moment with dp where it just clicks and you can easily come up with states and transitions
why u didn't practice in 22 & 23
how do you be able to solve very hard problems 2400+ while you solved only 400 problems ?
Thank you for your kind reply :) Yeah I always try to use top down approach and then convert it into iterative, that clicks more easily at least in my case. Looks like there is no way out except battling with more and more problems.
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