views on codechef cook off

This happened again this month also,Problem choosers for contest are not going right towards deciding the level of problem. somehow at the moment I realize Travelling Chef Problem can be solved using system of linear equation and apply gaussian elimination to find variables i spend time to read how to do that. at it took so much time. I also posted a same query related to determinant and same concept problem appeared in cook-off. :stuck_out_tongue:

so this month i am also telling that please maintain difficulty level of cook-off. same thing happened to me last month also.

Thanks

yesterday i went through the March cook-off. which had 5 question.i felt the questions is not maintained as it should be.if we look towards the long contest the question toughness level increasing is not so high a medium level programmer able to solve 4-5 problem easily.this is around 50% question asked in long question. while in cook off problem set there is only one problem that has 1300+ submission and the second problems submission only 114 and third question has also 110 submission,many mid-level programmer somehow managed to solve second question in O(n^2)which is simply dynamic programming problem.i also did it in O(n^2) but the time limit was strict after looking through editorial i felt ashamed, it was easy,but the logic used was not captured at the time of competition by everyone who give a try to it. I think the second question should have time limit more then as it was or string length should be limited to pass in quadratic time.I know codechef here to teach us more about logic and increase programming knowledge.but logic was not too easy to capture. i request other participant to give views on this.and hope from next time setter gives also attention to the difficulty level of problem.

Thanks.

9 Likes

@antim_patel : I don’t agree with allowing a sub-optimal solution to pass . However I agree that a gradually increasing level of difficulty should be there in cook-off .

The second easiest question should have been slightly more easy , I guess that is what you want to say .

Currently it was 1 Cakewalk , 2 Easy-Medium , and 2 Medium-Hard . Probably 1 Cakewalk , 1 Easy , 1 Easy-Medium , 1 Medium and 1 Medium-Hard would be good for Cook-off . But you see , it is not always easy to access the difficulty of the problem beforehand.

Anyways , Happy coding .

15 Likes

i agree with @antim_patel,
cook-off’s are now confined for only top 100 coders only ,
short contest is meant to be for everyone , we try to solve next problem after the first, may be we can solve it but we were not able to figure out the solution so quickly, Short contest is more about accuracy and speed and something less about the difficulty, I request codechef must think on it

2 Likes

this is exactly i wanted level of question on codechef cook off problems. and i also not in favor of pass a sub optimal solution. question type should be different which can also satisfy the appropriate constraints. hope from next time we will see it.

1 Like

most of the problems were from geometry and mathematics! only one problem was of graphs.There should be variety of questions plus the difficulty level to was absurd. :frowning: :frowning: not good!

4 Likes

Do you realize that an O(N log^2 N) solution with high constant can be slower than a simple O(N sqrt(N)) solution, while the latter is obviously sub-optimal?

Sometimes it’s just not possible. That actually makes sense, though - practical computer science is striving to optimize realtime performance, because if you’re waiting for the results of some commputation for hours, it won’t really make you feel any better to know that its complexity in O-notation is better… so much win…

1 Like