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What's the coolest/funniest/weirdest problem statement you've ever seen?
By Kita, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hey guys,

Whats the most unique or coolest problem statement for a competitive programming problem you've seen? Doesn't have to just be from codeforces.

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12 months ago, # |
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This must be the first: AtCoder Birthday Problem X

And this: Is It Rated?

If "traditional" CP tasks are not necessary, then you should know the last task in each round of a chinese CP contest named THUPC is eligible. Like this.

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    12 months ago, # ^ |
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    This must be the first: AtCoder Birthday Problem X

    Similar problem appeared in Vietnam in 2012: link

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      12 months ago, # ^ |
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      Indonesian National Olympiad in Informatics 2012 (coincidentally same year as Vietnam?): link

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12 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +33 Vote: I do not like it

GOV chronicles from Timus has a very long problem statement describing a story of a particular ICPC team. Each of the people that ever was a member of the team got assigned an identifier from 0 to 13. The problem asks you to, given the identifier, print the number of contests this person participated in as a part of the team.

I remember some high-rated participant (enot110?) was doing a stream like "I solve timus problems of a particular rating, and if I can't solve it in 20 minutes I do X push-ups". I suggested the problem and the streamer had to do push-ups after it :D

Besides that, problems from Codeforces Aprils fools contests are notorious for not having any statement (only input/output format). Then, there are also notorious problems such as

I think there are also a lot of "unorthodox" problems in Gassa and Petr contests.

P.S. Why does the title says that this post was written 2 years ago?

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    12 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +28 Vote: I do not like it

    Hello! Thanks for the komment

    Uh, about the 2 years ago part, I'm not so sure myself — this is actually the first blog post I made when I first started codeforces, and I am not sure why people suddenly started making comments here now, but yeah

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12 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +193 Vote: I do not like it

Translation
Illustrated examples
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    12 months ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it

    Can not stop laughing, thank you for making my day)

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12 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

1663A - Who Tested?

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12 months ago, # |
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An unexpected kind of problem format: H. Human Resources

A problem in wich my non deterministic solution some times gets accepted and some times wrong answer: I. 1%-Euclidean

My solution is:

But I think that probably it is not the expected solution

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12 months ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +17 Vote: I do not like it

This problem from OmegaUp, a Mexican judge. At first I thought the problem statement was broken, that it was some type of bug, but no, the problem statement is just like that.

I would like to explain the statement but that would spoil the problem.

Spoiler

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