Highlights
_ Questions attempted_ : 2
### ** 1st got accepted A. Vladik and Courtesy ### ** 2nd got hacked B. Vladik and Complicated Book
Question Discussion:
A fairly easy implementation based question.
-The one who finished the question first , took about 1 minute to do this question, however, I took about half an hour.Moreover, I got my first submission wrong, as I did not totally understand the question clearly enough. I got it right on the second attempt though.
B. Vladik and Complicated BookI instinctively knew that the solution I provided was suboptimal, but I knew no other way to attempt this question, other than to use sort again and again for each query.
- Initially, it did pass the pretests ( I didn't know that there were more test-cases that would be run on it later ), and I couldn't believe my luck. Unfortunately, it got hacked in a few minutes :-/.
After the contest ended, I went through the editorial ( quickly understood how I could fix the time complexity bottleneck ) and quickly coded up the solution, got AC !!
RESULT : SPECIALIST__ (1404) ( seems like codeforces rating system rewards newbies generously )
Reflection : :
Try to read and understand questions quick, keeping in mind the corner cases, and touch the keyboard only after you're convinced that you've thought of all possible corner cases
If the solution that you've thought of would get a TLE , due to the constraints of the problem, then don't push your luck. Producing a solution not keeping in mind the constraints is as good as not submitting a solution ( it's even worse, as you lose points as penalty )
The first 2 problems are doable by me (considering my present skill level ), as they do not require any algorithmic/ data structure knowledge. Just implementation skill and the skill to spot a pattern / reduce time complexity.
The other problems C ,D ,E , do requre algorithmic knowledge... I'll get there once I study up those Algo's and have enough practice to be able to attempt them in competitions.