Hello coders,
Recently I have observed that in contests the problems are explained in a very awful manner. It feels like we have to guess what the problem setter actually wants to get as the output.
Wasted a lot of time due to such poor quality of problem statements. Even an easier problem looks so difficult due to such issues. CodeChef should atleast review the problem statements for the sake of problem understanding purpose if possible. What do you guys think about this??
Concrete examples and explaining what parts were ambiguous would be very helpful.
I personally like longer statements that don’t get to the point and circle around the key part of the problem, simply for the sake of practicing, because international olympiads tend to be full of the unnecessary details, stories, etc. and it can be very helpful skill to learn to differentiate between important and unimportant. I appreciate it only during the practise sessions though.
But I’d make a tradeoff to admire short and easy to understand statements. It’s really a double-edged sword.
How about make statements clear and easy to understand in short contests and keep the stories for the Long? That would be the best solution I could think of, but if I had to pick just one of them - give me the easy-to-understand one.
Please check this . In the end the problem setter forgot to explain if we need to output longest staircase sequence or any staircase sequence or anything else.
Thanks for giving an example. But as stated multiple times, external unrated contests are not vetted by Codechef. We do not have the bandwidth to review the statements or testdata, nor do we wish to do so in the future.
If you find any ambiguity in the statements of rated contests, we are all ears.