After a busy weekend rowing abroad, it was finally time to get back to coding. By skipping one of my lectures on heaps, I managed to make it back home and join the contest only 20 minutes late, ready to solve some easy problems.

The contest went way worse than I expected — I only solved A and B. It might just be coping, but I think problems C and D were too difficult for Div. 4 — they felt Div. 3 level at the very least. I spent a good while trying to find some patterns on C, but couldn't manage to put together a solution. For problem D, I didn't notice very important key details and spent considerable time researching how to use bitsets, but even after I figured out how to read the bits of numbers, the solution I had didn't work and would probably have been too slow anyway. While doing problem E, I made a mistake when I came up with my algorithm to solve it, which turned out to be a major flaw that made the whole algorithm useless. It's a bit sad that I will most likely drop down below 1k, but I'll just climb back up.

I think that I'll do some problems on Leetcode involving bits to better prepare for questions like D. I'll also check out the editorials and try to find how I could come up with solutions for C and E once they get published.

'til the next contest!