Petr's blog

A week with Merlin
By Petr, history, 9 years ago, In English

http://petr-mitrichev.blogspot.com/2015/08/codeforces-round-315-gave-this-week.html

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9 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

Hi Petr. Thanks for your posts, and efforts in the field of CP. Regarding the "upsolving", term is cool and already in use by large community (Russian-speaking), and they are also pioneering the field with their nonpareil quality of knowledge and commitment. Specific terms or field-related ones have generally been coined by the masters of the field. For instance, "Id, ego and super-ego", "Oedipus complex", etc were products of Sigmund Freud; "Electra complex" was introduced into the psychoanalytic field by his early student Carl Jung, (trivia) with whom, ultimately, Freud broke off all relations.

Note: No offence was intended on other nations.

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9 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +130 Vote: I do not like it

Language is formed by usage. The word "upsolving" hasn't been a valid English word and it certainly sounds weird when you first encounter it. However, I'm not aware of any single dictionary word that could be used to describe the process and wouldn't feel awkward. So let's just go ahead and let's call it upsolving. If enough people do so, it becomes a valid word :)

Also, the next generation can then wonder about its meaning the same way the current generation wonders wtf do the words "dynamic programming" actually mean :)

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +51 Vote: I do not like it

    So, what does DP actually mean?

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it -95 Vote: I do not like it

    Let's call a community vote: everyone who agrees to call it "upsolving", just upvote misof's comment above. And then a new term will be officially coined.

    And to have a measurable bound, let say that the Codeforces community consists of around 1000 (div 1) + 3000 (div 2) = 4000 active people, more or less. So, if the comment get more than 2000 votes, we will consider it "Successful".

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9 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

I've already asked on Quora about "upsolving", looks like there is no established word for competitive programming, but there are several similar from other areas.

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    9 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

    Apart from the Russian-speaking community, there seems to be moderately widespread usage of "upsolving" also in the Indian community on CodeChef.

    "Upsolving" has nice positive connotations, and personally I detest "дорешивание" (а "сокомандники" это вообще сущая мерзость!)

    To me these connotations imply improvement, and maybe upsolving is the part of the contest where all the learning and improvement happens, while the contest proper is just a test...

    Also, it sounds close to "absolving", absolving your poor performance so that it won't happen again. (With the irony that the non-mistakes are a finite set of islands in an unbounded space of mistakes.)

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9 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -26 Vote: I do not like it

I've read the title as "A week with Merlini".

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