Firstly, heartiest congratulations and best wishes to all the teams who qualified for the snackdown elimination round(Or are going to qualify ). This is the first time I have qualified and I am a bit excited.
I have a personal question for the teams. If the members of the teams are not physically with each other then how would they establish an effective mode of communication?
Now, a more general question: The problems in these ICPC-like(Snackdown elimination or cook-offs) contests are not sorted in any order of difficulty like normal codeforces rounds. What is the best strategy that the top performers use to know which is the easiest problem? Is it luck? Is it intuition? I don’t think its effective to read all the statements before starting, or else there is no way a team solves the first problem in less than 5 mins.
If the members of the teams are not physically with each other then how would they establish an effective mode of communication?
– Last year i was in a similar situation, so we mostly discussed over call and IM.
Once you choose the questions which either one will be working on individually, you should be good to go. And if a discussion is needed you can use slack or call(ofcourse)
Solving the easy problem in <5min is based on luck I guess, because as there are 2 members.
Each opening a question and easy question can be coded within 5 minutes.
Given there are ~5 questions, which brings the probability to ~40%, so thats good, i guess.
And 30 minutes into the questions, the contest board at Codechef pretty much is in difficulty order
Our strategy so far has been to read the questions and as soon as you find a question that you think you can do, Whatsapp the other person so that they don’t try it. This is done until a question is encountered that both of us can’t find a way to deal with. We just brain storm different ideas and data structure and we try to prove each other’s approach wrong so that we don’t end up trying to implement wrong solutions.
About the second part, it has already been discussed here:
Thank you for your answer. For the second part, I meant when you want to be the first to solve a specific problem, how would you know the difficulty. In other words, I wanted an answer other than waiting 30 minutes or probabilistic approach.
). This is the first time I have qualified and I am a bit excited.
