Hi everybody! I am a student and preparing for my third ACM-ICPC season.
Recently, I found a site ICPC Live Archive, which contains many problems from different regionals competitions of past years. I solved some problems from here, but some of them are very easy for me, and some are very difficult. I think, that these problems more suitable for team trainigs, not individual (I haven't a stable team). Also, I solve a problems from school olympiads (USACO, National OI's and etc). In my opinion, these problems more suitable for individual trainings. Also, many of them "less standard", then student problems.
I want to know, how many people solve school problems for preparing to ACM-ICPC? And which problems are more suitable for it?
Sorry for my bad English.
You see, there is no strict division between "school" problems and "student" problems.
All distinction between those kinds of problems is mostly implied by the difference in contest format. Here are the main points:
Student contests in ACM ICPC format usually consist of 10-14 problems while school contests are usually in something similar to IOI format where you have 3 or 4 problems for the same 5 hours. This means that usually in ACM ICPC-like contest the most part of problems will be easier than problems in an advanced school competition.
On IOI-like competition you may spend hours on a single problem, so it may involve some non-trivial coding or some advanced idea that you should think about for a long time until you get it. Some problems from all-Russian Olympiad in Informatics or from Moscow Open Olympiad in Informatics are really hard, they would easily be the hardest problem in an ACM ICPC-like problemset.
On the other hand, school competitions usually lack some problem types, for example, probability theory, advanced linear algebra or some special algorithms. IOI Syllabus lists the topics that may appear on IOI and this is the list of themes that may appear on almost every school competition, but actually school competitions may involve some topics not listed there (like there may be advanced string suffix structures or flow problems depending on a specific competition).
So, overall: if we speak about a high-level school competitions and student contests, the former may provide interesting problems requiring some investigation and lots of thinking with possibly non-trivial coding while the latter deals with wider specter of topics and difficulty levels.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
But what you can say about problems from Petrozavodsk training camp. Are they suitable for individual training for student of my level (Stable cyan now)?
I think they are a bit harder than needed for you. I think they correspond to a div1-level, but, what more important, you said you are now training individually, and I believe that it is a much better idea to keep them until the time you have a team you are going to participate with. Petrozavodsk contests are one of the best contests you can find and believe me, you don't want to use them inappropriately.