3 ms·
I immersed myself in Competitive Programming this year and I'm very glad I did. I like it a lot for a couple of reasons: It is a very nice challenge/sport. The
by quirino 3y ago
I immersed myself in Competitive Programming this year and I'm very glad I did. I like it a lot for a couple of reasons:
It is a very nice challenge/sport. The skill ceiling is high but there are many high quality resources online. The rating systems on competitive websites makes seeing your improvement very rewarding.
It serves as an endless source of problem solving "ingenuity". Many problems have extremely elegant solutions. I find it especially satisfying to find subtle ideas/intuitions from one problem being applicable to another one.
- jhck 3y agoI share that sentiment. I've been practicing Competitive Programming off-and-on for some years now. I still struggle a lot with it. But sometimes I manage to come up with a nice solution, and that makes it all worth it to me. When I make no progress at all, I take comfort in an anecdote I once read about the statistician Jimmie Savage [1]: "Jimmie had what he called 'a long-standing neurosis about Pólya-Szegö' (the most famous and long-lived problem book in analysis). Even when he was working on his first (and major) book in Paris, he was spending evenings on that neurosis. 'Pólya-Szegö humiliates me', he wrote. 'I never really know what's going on, but I can now work quite a few of the problems and seem to learn thereby some things of general interest.'" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jimmie_Savage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Jimmie_Savage [2] Quote from Paul Halmos's Automathography