Hello guys, it's zzzzsust19 once again. After years of Zen Meditation, I have finally gotten to CM. Now, until today, people have been cyber bullying me by constantly reporting my post to oblivion. But, this time, I have finally achieved immunity towards cyber bullying in codeforces by surpassing around 95% of you guys. Bwahahahahaha....

Anyways, since today I have finally got to CM (without any practice of course), I have decided to push aside all my trash-talking for this one day. Ask me anything

Hello guys, after months of nonexistent problem solving, I have finally decided to take a break from CP. I think my method of sleeping around is not working any more. I need to wake up from my slumber. What's the best course of action, I want to hear your thoughts about it. Also, how to become CM?

This is a convex hull trick problem. I am building my convex hull from leaf to higher nodes. Every time I am going through all my child nodes, I am merging them together. In this solution, I am not applying light to heavy technique. Because of the increasing CHT size, I would expect my solution to get TLE on the given constraints. But for some reason, it's not getting TLE. Anyone got any proper explanation?

Problem: 932F - Escape Through Leaf

My submission: 227235272

Last time I made a blog about the sad tale of my journey in competitive programming, many people were highly supportive towards me and showed their support by downvoting my post into oblivion. But after a long journey throughout the valley of despair, once again I am about back into my form in competitive programming, and also back to piss everyone off. Also look at my graph, I haven't practiced a single problem in past 4 months!

Anyways, I am a tri-Expert (Quadra if you count deranking and upranking again), ask me anything (Except how to become expert).

Hello everyone, everyone's favorite zzzzsust19 here. As you may not see, I have been going through a rough time. So, I want to discuss and contemplate about the difficulties I am facing and try finding out what's going wrong. You see, I have spent a lot of time in competitive programming. It's already been 3 years since I opened this account, basically that means I have over 3 x 365 x 24 = 26280 hours in competitive programming. But compared to my time spent in CP, I clearly haven't made enough progress at all. I spend hours after hours behind thinking about what I am doing wrong and why I am not a Grandmaster yet but am struggling to find an answer. As you can guess by my profile pic, I spend a lot of time sleeping and dreaming about becoming grandmaster in Codeforces. In my mind, I already am the best philosopher and the best Grandmaster in codeforces. But reality fails to reflect that. I also asked the CP community several times "How to become GM". You see, doing CP is like playing Kabadi, everybody gets together to pull down the one person who is trying to achieve something. So clearly the community doesn't appreciate my quest for becoming a Grandmaster in Codeforces.

You may notice that I haven't practiced a single problem in past 4 months. It's because I believe in smart work, not hard work. Hard work is for dummies who can't think clearly enough, complicating simple matters. Isn't it right guys? I also went through severe depression throughout my last month and did contests anyways, because mental illness is clearly not a thing and I definitely don't need to see a therapist.

But despite my best efforts, I am not a grandmaster yet. Clearly, I am doing something wrong, right? So guys, how to become GM?

Look at this solve count. I have accumulated 100+ 1900 rating problem solves, but am barely an Expert. My practice approach doesn't look alright. If you are wondering how I practice, I arrange a sheet of problems, which are taken from the problemset ordered in ascending order of rating. No guides, no tutorial, no tags (Yes tags if I am stuck on it for a while), until the problem is solved. But somehow it doesn't feel right. It feels like I am still just as good as I was when I had half the 1900 solves I currently have.

And also, somehow 1900 feels easier than 1800. Am I imagining things

Hello guys, I have finally reached an absolute contribution of 50, which is a great deal for me. It took me about 3 years to reach this point. By next year, I am aiming to reach an absolute contribution of 100, wish me good luck.

Bro I have been following you for like months, but still haven't seen you active in any contest. You are still about 800 ratings away from taking the hotspot. Looking forward to your future contests, huge fan. Also a huge fan of python, but python ditched me.

Hello guys, I have been an active codeforces blogger for quite a while now, farming contributions. So far I have only caught up to -35. I want to go even higher (lower) but I am a bit concerned about the aspects of contribution. Is there any negative consequences of having contribution too low? Because I might have to farm some positive contributions from time to time in that case. Also, thanks to everyone I pissed off who ended up downvoting, your opinions matter shit.

I have been active in competitive programming for around a year, have been solving problems like every day. But I still can't get over this problem. I almost never accurate codes on first try. If I have taken half an hour to write a code, I have to spend another half debugging it. This happens in almost all medium to large sized codes. How do I improve accuracy of code?

Problem: 1624F - Interacdive Problem. Submission: 191765637. I am testing test cases offline, my answers are correct. However test cases show wrong answer on the first case. And it doesn't even let me know what is wrong with my answer or what my output is. Who created these dogshit testcases

jiangly_fan_fan_fan_fan has participated in four contests. His positions in these contests are 1st, 1st, 9th and 1st. All of them are Div 2. At first, I was excited to be the one to find out that this is Jiangly's alt account, because (-1)^4 = 1. But then I found out that this guy is not Jiangly. Both of them participated in CF round 843 and also their coding styles do not match. Such a shame to get tuned down from Sherlock Holmes to a basement dueler conspiracy theorist. Anyways, before you go asking about who asked, you may boggle your mind wondering who asked "who asked", because I didn't.

Whazzup guys, last time I wrote a QnA blog post sharing my experience of being a quadra-specialist. Now, some of you guys were visibly unimpressed about my blatantly unimpressive performance of being a specialist four times. So, I deranked myself (unintentionally) and became specialist again. Now, I am a penta-specialist in codeforces with the experience of being specialist four times! Now, before you go about "Ewwww... Cyan", let me remind you that I am no ordinary Cyan. I have been cyan for like forever (for like 4 months), so I have been here for longer than most of you guys have ever been in cyan, also I am a penta-cyanist. That makes me a darker version of Cyan, which is basically Blue.

Now, I actually wanted to write this post after I became blue and proved my worth. But I just got smacked down hard in my main id to below 1500s. So, that won't be happening anytime soon.

If you are wondering about my qualifications and why I have been stuck in cyan for so long. Well, that's because I have been held back by a primordial power, the fear of heights.

Anyways, ask me anything

I solved this problem, Odd-Even Subsequence using binary search. But I also saw the tag DSU. I went for the tutorial but there is only the binary search approach. I am having a hard time connecting this problem to DSU. Can anybody explain how to solve this using DSU

This is my submission 184446767 The problem link: https://codeforces.net/problemset/problem/1620/E

At first I thought I was getting MLE for using maps, then I used vector for mapping the elements of list. Not to mention, the number of elements in which test case I am getting MLE is surprisingly small. It's only 1000 * 2 items in array at most.

Now, I created a separate vector to store queries, it's a 2d vector. I am using first dimension to store the index where the query starts. The second dimension implies the number of queries in that index. This is the only thing that looks sus to me. Otherwise I don't get the cause of MLE

Without you, I would have never started CP. I can never express how grateful I am to you for the inspiration and dedication. You would be happy to know that I have finally become a specialist. That's why, today I have drawn several pictures of you just to show how grateful I am to you.

You see, having a negative contribution of 35 in codeforces is the best/worst thing I have ever done in my life. It's quite easy, every time I make a post about "how to become a red coder", my contributions pile up a little. Now, I am not content with just -35, I envision to take it much further. Currently, my aim is to become a LGM in negative contribution by surpassing the likes of great GMs and LGMs like Sparky_Master_WCH1226 and more. Now using the same formula results in diminishing returns as stated by a great economist, and getting to that height takes a lot of talent and effort. It's a shame that there's no achievement trophy for it. Good and evil are like two sides of the same coin and one shouldn't be looked down at than another. There should be a leaderboard for people like me, like maybe a "Bounty Hunter Board" or something, whenever you see 'em downvote 'em. A thing like that might boost our morale and efforts.

By the way, how to become a red coder?

Guys I am having trouble getting to specialist. How do I become a specialist?

My guess for problem H would be 1800. How would you rate the ICPC problems this year?

Hello guys, quadra-specialist zzzzsust19 here. I call myself quadra-specialist because I became specialist 4 times. My hobby is becoming specialist. I got myself from 0 to 1400+ 4 times because I am too afraid of going down. Ask me anything Also, be sure to downvote this blog as much as you can. Use all your alt accounts

Guys how do I become blue then purple then orange then more orange then red then black red coder?

How can I get the color red? I like green better, but I will have to derank to get the color Green. Red seems to be a little tough to get. How can I get the color Red. You guys don't halp me. I think I will have to buy the color red instead

I can't bring myself to see editorials. At least not before I have solved a problem. Of around 700 problems I solved, I have seen editorials less than ten times. So it takes a lot of time for me to solve hard problems, lasting usually from 2-3 hours to a few days, and sometimes a few months. Now, it is quite inefficient, but I still want to rely on editorials/tutorials as less as possible. Relying on editorials ruin my experience and interest. How can I improve my efficiency without relying on editorials

Problem link: https://codeforces.net/problemset/problem/1294/D

My submission: https://codeforces.net/contest/1294/submission/172332862

The problem I am trying to solve has constraints as given, 1 <= q, x <= 4 * 10^5 The time complexity of the solution I have submitted is around O(2 * q). It's basically a linear time solution.

My expectation was that the highest time it would take would be around 100-200 ms. But the solution took around 1200 ms at worst case. Which is far higher than I expected. What is the reason behind this high time complexity

I have been getting runtime error on test case 41. I have been trying to figure out the cause, even rewrote my code, but can't seem to understand why I am getting the error. Here's my code 150627419