baal-hammon's blog

Dealing with contest environment (IOI)
By baal-hammon, history, 8 years ago, In English

Hello ! I am an IOI 2016 contestant and thinking about my experience from the last year IOI I had two major problems with the contest environment making me loose lot's of precious time :

1) testing my solution with the grader provided was really unfamiliar for me
2) problems do not require I/O routine but instead coding a function that takes input as parameter

(and such difficulties was enhanced by contest stress )

I know such technicalities may be trivial for a veteran contestant but I really don't to see my effort lost because of that , so it will be nice if someone provides some help :D

thanks !

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8 years ago, # |
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It will be my first year so my comment may contain some wrongs. In practising, the only thing I have to do is "download templates, write in problem.cpp and ./compile_cpp.sh then ./problem in terminal". IMHO it's really nice to code like that. I did thoose in MacOSX but I'm pretty sure nothing changes in Ubuntu, am I right?

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8 years ago, # |
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Which IDE do you use?
I use Codeblocks. I create a new project, delete the generated cpp file and add the cpp template and grader to the project (different project for each problem)
Usually in the Implementation section of the problem they tell you how the grader takes the input. Check the grader source code to see if it takes input from a file, if so just change the input and output files to stdin and stdout then you can provide the input from a console when running.
Write your code on the template of course, not the grader. Compile, test and debug it as you would do on any Codeblocks project
I haven't been to IOI yet but I tried this at home.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
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    thanks a lot !

    I have just downloaded the templates (I didn't know that they are available in the IOI site)
    now things will go right !

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8 years ago, # |
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These kinds of problems are exactly what the Practice Round is for. Even if you cannot figure it yourself, ask a question, that's what's the practice session is for. If no one from the organizers is available, ask literally anyone around and with high chances you'll find someone willing to help.

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