Hi, everybody. This is a place where you can express your general feedback about the April Challenge that has just ended.
Regarding weak tests in DISHLIFE: read my answer here.
What do you think about problems, including their difficulty? My personal opinion is that easy problems should be a bit easier, and there should be one more very hard problem (instead of one medium-hard problem). Do you agree?
In my opinion, this Challenge was an unusually easy one. The first 3 questions were alright, easy enough as they should be. But next came 4 easy-medium problems - CLIQUED, CHEFDIV, SMARKET, and RNDGRID, out of which in my opinion, 2 could have been discarded. Instead of them, 2 more medium-difficult problems would have made the contest a much more exciting one.
And yes, one very-hard problem (harder than HLD) would have been good - When the top 20 contestants all have 999 points, the deciding factor becomes luck rather than skill.
The contest was really good. I enjoyed solving the problems. What I feel is one easy-medium problem could have been a medium-hard or hard problem. Otherwise, it was a nice problem set.
Great contest, loved the fact that there was space even for Naive/Psuedo-Naive solutions. Made the contest much more interesting and even beiginners could attempt almost all problems and get some points.
This Long contest was a good one to fetch many points, which helps in motivating one (especially beginners) to keep programming and learn new stuff. The Easy problems were really easy, and there was a lack of Medium/Medium-Hard problems. I liked how DGTCNT could be solved using Inclusion-Exclusion principle too (I am bad with DP :P)
Overall though, there was some inflation in the points scored by people, especially for the top rankers - top 32 above 990 points is unusual! Again that is because of the unequal distribution in difficulty level. But sometimes such Challenges are fun!
I think the gradient of the contest was very appropriate and uniform.All the questions were really interesting and fun to solve with a diverse variety of concepts involved as well such as segmented seive,merge sort tree,digit dp with inclusion/exclusion and tree dp.Great problem setting @errichto.
The problems were conceptually strong. It required the person to be well versed in multiple concepts. I liked the DGTCNT and that stanle market ones the most. Also by giving that sort-based question, the peoblem setters stressed the vital point that “one must build his fundamentals and have his basic clear” . Because those who arent versed with the sorting algo wouldnt be able to solve the final sub task.
Weak test cases or not, the problems were decent concept wise and APRIL LONGs problems are the ones i recommend solving for practice as they check multiple concepts.
A small suggestion from my side, can a feature of showing the judge’s testcases after the contest is over be added, similar to codeforces, hackerearth and hackerrank ? It will make some people like me think of what can be the corner cases of the solution.
I guess only an addition of a somewhat harder problem than the last question would have resulted in a usual leaderboard. Though there were too many easy-medium/medium problems but the concept and the constructive solution they had was worth a long challange.Also the fun quotient of the questions was good.