Adhami's blog

Overestimating Easy Problems
By Adhami, history, 5 years ago, In English

I am experiencing a weird problem that makes my performance in OI contests very bad. I can't identify easy problems, and I usually over-estimate them and ignore them and try in other harder problems, and even when I don't ignore them I don't have the mind to solve a problem rather than collecting points from subtasks.

I have seen this pattern in so many OI contest I participated in, I usually solve some harder problem while the easier one holds my score back, especially if those easy ones requires some greedy approach or some observation. Is there a way to avoid this situation rather than solving hundreds of these problems? I'm totally OK with solving some, but I have to practice on hard problems too. Does anybody experience this situation before? How did you get over it?

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5 years ago, # |
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Not actually "solving hundreds of these problems", but I keep a small flow of myself doing virtual/practice on easy problems/contests (like some Div.3 for example). You can do once a week or once a fortnight, no issues, the catch is not dropping your mind away from the patterns and "familiarity" of easy problems...

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    5 years ago, # ^ |
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    I'm doing virtual contests, that's how my assumptions got confirmed. I will try to always compete in Div3. Thank you for your advice :D

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      5 years ago, # ^ |
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      The problem is, when you do div 3, you know that the problems are meant to be easy (at least for div 1 people). You will not give up so easily (and won't think too hard) when you approach any of the problems because you know that the solution is not that complicated.

      I suggest that you do a contest with random problems. For example, if I were you, I would go to virtual judge and choose an arbitrary contest so that I won't have any idea of the difficulty of the problem set. That truly simulates an actual contest. Don't you think so?

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        5 years ago, # ^ |
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        You have some great point, but the thing is, I don't have time to do too many virtual contests. Do you have a good website to do that? I'm already doing regular virtual contests (without knowing the easy problems from the hard one), Do you think that this is enough?

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          5 years ago, # ^ |
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          I'm already doing regular virtual contests (without knowing the easy problems from the hard one), Do you think that this is enough?

          You mean CodeForces virtual contests? If that is so, I don't think that is going to be very helpfui towards treating your problem. Because the division labels and sorting of problems already gives away information about their difficulty.

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            5 years ago, # ^ |
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            I'm doing OI contests with my friend, we are not sure about what contests to do virtual contests on, but we did on CEOI, and we are looking for something else now. Do you have a suggestion?

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              5 years ago, # ^ |
              ← Rev. 3   Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

              Do you have a suggestion?

              How about trying ICPC regionals (I am not sure which region is good)? I heard that a typical contest has problems with a good difficulty distribution (i.e. there might be problems which every team can solve). Of course, don't look at the scoreboard beforehand.

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                5 years ago, # ^ |
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                I would prefer some OI contests, because I'm training for IOI, but that could do the trick if we didn't find what we are looking for. Thank you for your time and advice :D

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5 years ago, # |
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you don't happen to have learnt a lot of new topics/techniques recently ?

if yes read along
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    5 years ago, # ^ |
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    The only recent thing I learnt is CHT (still can't implement it tho), but I don't think this is what's wrong in my situation (but I was able to identify a CHT problem while doing VC).

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