Hello there,

This is my first blog, which is about making mistakes and learning from them. Hopefully it will be of use to someone.

Be careful with accumulate!

Last competition was one of my worst performances ever Codeforces Round 956 (Div. 2) and ByteRace 2024. It wasn't obvious to me how to solve B so I skipped it and started working on C which I thought is pretty straightforward. I ended up submitting 9 wrong submissions on C and wasting almost all my time on it.

It turns out that all my submissions were correct aside from one little nasty bug. I used the function "accumulate" to sum values in a vector of long longs but it turns out that accumulate sums them as ints instead of long longs...

Here is my first submission for C 269261777 and here's a submission I made after the contest that got AC 269299787. You may notice that the only difference is in the accumulate function.

What to do after such a mistake?

There's really only one thing that can be done after such a mistake. Suck it up and learn from it.

Rating

I used to care a lot about my rating and still do to a certain extent, which is why I started conditioning myself to not care about it as much. Of course, I still do care about my rating and caring about one's rating can be a good motivator for improvement. However I believe that caring a little too much can certainly be detrimental. In this case, it is much easier for me to learn from this mistake than it would've been had I not started trying to not care as much.

Stop caring about rating. Care about being good.

The way I started caring less about rating is that I participated pretty much in every contest despite the circumstances. Visiting a friends house for a few days? I can do a contest. Not feeling prepared at all? Doesn't really matter, still can learn from the contest. Being ill (happened this time)? Same thing. Having a completely foreign setup (pc,mouse,keyboard,editor)? Improve, adapt, overcome.

I do wonder whether I'm not taking it too far as there are cases where I'm pretty sure that I'm going to lose rating and I participate regardless. Maybe not participating and just doing a virtual contest later would have a similar effect while preserving rating. However, I feel that from the competitions where the conditions are most unfriendly, I learn the most.

tl;dr: Cope