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Out of curiosity. What would be the best way to learn these skills in your opinion? What are these "many good competitive programming sites" that you recommend?

Jensson 5y ago
The site I used is codeforces. https://codeforces.com/?f0a28=1 https://codeforces.com/?f0a28=1 It has the widest selection and types of problems as far as I know but that was a while ago. It runs competitions all the time, the problem descriptions are well defined unlike leetcode which often misses a lot of requirements, it has way more kinds of problems than topcoder, you can test yourself against old competitions as if they ran real time to properly ensure you don't take too much time or accidentally cheat etc. > What would be the best way to learn these skills in your opinion? I think today it is hard to practice without competitive programming. Ideally someone would make a similar format pushing your limits like this but without so much focus on complex algorithms and maths, but since that doesn't exist competitive programming is what we are left with. The competition aspect is really important since it is how people push each others limits. It is easy to think "you can't get much better than this" when you just sit and code by yourself, but in programming competitions you see how fast and accurately others can solve problems, so you realize that you could get just as fast and accurate with a bit of practice. And no, it is not memorization. Consider this easy problem which mediocre competitive programmer manages to solve but those below mediocre fails at (we can see that from how well people did on it in the competition): https://codeforces.com/contest/1496/problem/B https://codeforces.com/contest/1496/problem/B There is no algorithm you have to know for that, it is just good old logic and some coding. It is really easy and I could solve in in a few minutes even my todays rusty self, but you can't memorize solutions to such problems, you just have to be fast both with the reasoning and the code. Note "mex" is not a standard term, it is just something they made up for that problem.
- novok 5y ago
  Thank you for your very detailed and helpful replies.

Jensson 5y ago

The site I used is codeforces. https://codeforces.com/?f0a28=1 https://codeforces.com/?f0a28=1 It has the widest selection and types of problems as far as I know but that was a while ago. It runs competitions all the time, the problem descriptions are well defined unlike leetcode which often misses a lot of requirements, it has way more kinds of problems than topcoder, you can test yourself against old competitions as if they ran real time to properly ensure you don't take too much time or accidentally cheat etc. > What would be the best way to learn these skills in your opinion? I think today it is hard to practice without competitive programming. Ideally someone would make a similar format pushing your limits like this but without so much focus on complex algorithms and maths, but since that doesn't exist competitive programming is what we are left with. The competition aspect is really important since it is how people push each others limits. It is easy to think "you can't get much better than this" when you just sit and code by yourself, but in programming competitions you see how fast and accurately others can solve problems, so you realize that you could get just as fast and accurate with a bit of practice. And no, it is not memorization. Consider this easy problem which mediocre competitive programmer manages to solve but those below mediocre fails at (we can see that from how well people did on it in the competition): https://codeforces.com/contest/1496/problem/B https://codeforces.com/contest/1496/problem/B There is no algorithm you have to know for that, it is just good old logic and some coding. It is really easy and I could solve in in a few minutes even my todays rusty self, but you can't memorize solutions to such problems, you just have to be fast both with the reasoning and the code. Note "mex" is not a standard term, it is just something they made up for that problem.

novok 5y ago
Thank you for your very detailed and helpful replies.