Bingooo's blog

Things that should know to be specialist
By Bingooo, history, 4 years ago, In English

I asked many coders about increasing rating...many of them told just to solve lots of problem +/- 100 points+your codeforces rating ... i did that .But what i feels during contest time is that if i would learn some basic techniques(like prefixsum,minimum sliding window , basic combinatorics,dp sometimes for problems C,D) i could have done better...Only learning with practicing seems very slow for me ... Can someone give suggestion what should learn and which tag of problems to solve at this stage to at least get of this gray circle? TIA :)

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4 years ago, # |
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Most people tell to solve problems +100 above your rating (but I was told by Monogon solving +300 is much better) because it’s really the best way to learn. I don’t think there is a better way than this. The algorithms you enumerated are usually present in the 1100-1200 rating problems, which are the ones +300 for you. Also, looking at your previous contests it doesn’t look like you get stuck on algorithmic problems, but mostly on greedy problems.

You might not see progress very fast, but I guarantee if you continue solving random problems above your rating (even if you need to read the editorial) you will definetly get better. There is no shortcut or any other special way to getting better.

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    I only saw improvement in contests when I took on anything in the range 1500-2000 but mostly practicing 1600-1700s... I think doing harder problems is very useful

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      even if we end up reading the editorial?

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        4 years ago, # ^ |
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        There is nothing wrong with reading the editorial after trying to solve the problem for a sufficient amount of time... If you don't see the editorial, how will you learn anything new?

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      arujbansal Brother your graph is so inspiring

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4 years ago, # |
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As I were a newbie, I solve a lot of simple implementation problems.

  • For some first 10 of the problems, I feel like I am so suck to learn CP, but then after trying hard for hours, I finally done all of it, atleast it is enough

  • For the first 100 of the problems, It take me less and less time to solve a problem, since I am favourite to these types, it take me averagely about 10-30 minutes to solve each one

After doing lots of implementation problems, my learning algos improved significantly !

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4 years ago, # |
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solve all green difficulty problems from atcoder and you will become an expert easily

watch problem difficulty from atcoder here(also put a tick "show difficulty"): https://kenkoooo.com/atcoder/#/table/slimnet instead of slimnet write your handle on atcoder

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    i_love_my_mom thanks brother...Do it help really me as my rating is low? And does their difficulty similar to codeforces?

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      4 years ago, # ^ |
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      you can try to solve not green but brown problems in the beginning if green are too hard for you, but dont solve grey on atcoder(they are not for brain, they are just for you to get accepted). atcoder has a lot more math-thinking oriented problems so it will make you think of the problems in a better way

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    4 years ago, # ^ |
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    Does color on problems symbolize the difficulty of the problem ??. Hey, can you tell me what is the difficult range for each color?

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4 years ago, # |
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Solve a lot of 1400-1700 problems, they are not very hard. Even if you are not able to solve them, you will realize that you can't be too far away from solution in those problems and over time, you will be able to solve them. Even they will increase your solving speed a lot.

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4 years ago, # |
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I think some knowledge of greedy technique, prefix sum, binary search and constructive algorithms are enough for becoming a specialist. You can try Atcoder problems which are brown or green difficulty and solve a lot of 1400 rated CF problems. I think you don't need to learn a lot of algorithms. Try to master the easy algorithms first.

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