Hi everyone,
Our team selection test will be in a month probably and I'm bad at olympiad style competitive programming, I mean I'm bad at Codeforces style but olympiad style is the next level, I have no training and solved hardly any olympiad problems, according to my friends and blogs I have seen, problem styles can be very different, I looked up for the blogs like this and either they were old, or they had no information, so which problems should I solve, from which olympiads and assuming I get selected, how should I train for IOI ?
(Also please don't cyberbully me, I know my English is trash.)
i don't want to cyberbully you but this is so cyan
This is a bit heartbreaking and completely accurate.
Problem Sources:
JOI — Japanese Olympiad in Informatics
POI — Polish Olympiad in Informatics
USACO — United States of America's Computing Olympiad
BOI — Baltic Olympiad in Informatics
APIO — Asian Pacific Olympiad in Informatics
CEOI — Central Europe Olympiad in Informatics
Note that APIO problems may sometimes contain out-of-IOI-syllabus topics but are still of good quality.
And please, do yourself a favor and use https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/62898#comment-468763 !
I will finish with a self note. From my experience (but I assume more experienced users will comment soon), quality OI problems require the competitor to make observations which are key to solving the problem — some invariants, parity arguments, a lower / upper bound on some important measure, greedy claims etc, and the ability to these observations comes with practice, which is the fun part :)
Also, a big difference between codeforces and IOI — subtasks. In a bunch of cases, the difference between medal X and medal X-1 is whether or not you solved some subtask, subtasks are important! Sometimes, a subtask is added on purpose to direct the competitor to some part of a solution which is worth more points, for example uncovering an important case or providing a different way to think about the problem. Even if you only intend to solve the full problem straight, please read the subtasks before you begin solving!
lior5654
I wish i can upvote you more than 1
Thanks a lot.