Usaco

[thegoose]

klopyrev @ Thu Apr 17, 2008 4:55 pm wrote:

DONE 2006.12.09 PROB Your Ride Is Here [ANALYSIS] (Chapter 1)
DONE 2006.12.24 PROB Raucous Rockers [ANALYSIS] (Chapter 3)

16 days...

Anyway, for Camelot... You're almost on the right track. In your BFS, consider adding a new state - whether the king has been picked up by this knight.

The fast record for finishing USACO training I've ever heard of is 2 weeks by Zhou Yuan....but he wasn't exactly learning how to code when he did that....

USACO training is a bit out of touch with the current situation of contests, but I guess it's probably a good place to start. The online judges aren't bad too (for all levels), although some of them are a bit overwhelming.

[klopyrev]

I can imagine someone good can finish USACO training in a week, just not many people bother.

And yes, I agree that USACO is out of date.

Although, it is very out of date compared to IOI, not so much for CCC.

[mwplachta]

It is not possible to finish all 6 chapters in just one week - NOBODY can do it (I mean if you really are solving it on your own, without help from any forums - and this is how you should work on it). And USACO is absolutely not out of date - I consider it the best programming contest and training web site in existence.

[r691175002]

Create a new account after completing it and go 18 hours a day.
I dare you.

Jokes aside, I think the USACO is the best resource, although it could use some more instructional text. It is pretty much a series of problems you must complete in order.

[thegoose]

mwplachta @ Sat Apr 19, 2008 10:10 pm wrote:

It is not possible to finish all 6 chapters in just one week - NOBODY can do it (I mean if you really are solving it on your own, without help from any forums - and this is how you should work on it). And USACO is absolutely not out of date - I consider it the best programming contest and training web site in existence.

I suppose the times we're discussing are by people who are already well trained and decided to do USACO to 'flex hands'. I've seen several occasions where these people knock off 50+ problems from the same section of an online judge in a day. Also, Zhou Yuan did finish IOI in 1 hour each day, so I wouldn't rule that out as a possbility since training is about 200 problems.

USACO training was put together before the major IOI escalation (Finland/Korea/Wisconsin). A lot of the techniques described on it are no longer useful on *OI and a lot of the 'hot' topics over the past few years are not covered. Also, a lot of the bottle necks on training are quite meaningless, and they typically cause a lot of frustration and time waste on the scale of months.

I would say USACO training is good for starting off, but things like Ural, SPOJ and TopCoder are equally good for that purpose. For harder problems at the IOI level, SGU and POI/BOI/CEOIs seems to be a must these days. (I did some experiments with the US team last summer, and the result seems to be going at POIs without seeing anything like those beforehand is virtually suicidal)

[mwplachta]

thegoose @ Sun Apr 20, 2008 12:27 am wrote:

I would say USACO training is good for starting off

This is true - I consider the USACO training site as a training site - and for this purpose it is very good.

[A.J]

Nice...people actually do USACO at compsci.ca (take that saad ).

anyways, I haven't visited it in a while now (about a month now), as I'm working on a chess program.


I'm at Ch. 4.

[Sane]

The USACO Open is today. I just finished the Bronze level competition in an hour (it's a four hour contest). Fairly confident I got perfect. But they won't promote me to Silver... It's to "prevent cheating" apparently.

Disappointed.

Edit: I'm annoyed because there's a glitch in the problem "Castle", which is preventing me from getting to the next section. The 7th output file seems to have gone missing.

I've sent them an e-mail, but no one's getting back to me. So I'm stuck inside this section until someone fixes whatever is wrong.

Could someone try resubmitting for the castle problem? It's under section 2.1.

My output is the correct output. Below is a screenshot.

[klopyrev]

Lol... Email Rob about it.

[thegoose]

klopyrev @ Thu Apr 24, 2008 7:22 pm wrote:

Lol... Email Rob about it.

Rob (and the rest of the coaches) is all busy with USopen and camp selection since this is the biggest USACO event of the year other than camp.

On a side note, there is a double header of contests this weekend (COI/Usopen). So if you have coding time that are currently being wasted, glhf. The COI website is here: http://www.hsin.hr/coci/.

[Sane]

thegoose @ Fri Apr 25, 2008 7:37 am wrote:

On a side note, there is a double header of contests this weekend (COI/Usopen). So if you have coding time that are currently being wasted, glhf. The COI website is here: http://www.hsin.hr/coci/.

Registered.

I'm sure I'll do terrible, but I need the practice. Thanks. (I figured out I messed up something really dumb on the Bronze division)

[Sane]

Holy crap. The COI is freaking difficult. I give up. I've had zero practice manipulating numbers as large as 10^18 ... And I'm pretty sure some of these questions involve having to take the square root of numbers that large.

[A.J]

I finished the bronze.

I wanted to ask you, Sane, whether you got it all perfectly?

I got everything except I think that my algorithm for the 3rd question might timeout (I am not going to talk about it any further as many people might still be writing it).

[Sane]

I made a really dumb mistake of making one of my arrays a char array when it needs to hold much larger values. Stupid mistake because I stopped after an hour. Otherwise it was all right. It's depressing because I get perfect on the silver contests, so I was hoping to move up to something more difficult...

[klopyrev]

I don't think COI is anymore difficult than IOI. I think this was actually a particularly easy COCI contest. I didn't actually participate in it. I was too lazy.