Throughout my short Competitive Programming journey one particular problem that I kept facing, which I think is the main reason of my slow progress is that despite sometimes getting the full ideas to a problem rather quickly, I would still spend 10 times longer trying implementing it until getting the test sample right let alone getting an AC.

I think this is a key factor why some newbies competitive programmer (including myself) progress poorly despite having some mathematical and algorithmic intuition (I am not claiming that I have such good intuition). They'll get burnt out implementing it properly and most of the times wasted their time that could have been used to advanced to another problems.

I believe that the skill of getting the key observation and actually implementing it right and clean are two different (yet not separated) skill. The question I want to ask for the more experienced competitive programmer are:

• Have you experienced similar case long time ago?

• If you have, do you have any tips on how to improve implementation?

• What to do if you cannot implement your solution after a long period of times? Should you move on?

Here is me trying to implement the solution for [problem:https://codeforces.net/contest/1294/problem/F] for hours after getting the the full ideas similar to the editorial.

Source: 211724504

Pain.