Challenge Problem Solving Technique

Can anyone here please provide any guidance regarding how to solve the challenge problem in the long contest? Are all the challenge problems are of same type or atleast do they have anything in common? Is there any common technique which I can apply in most of the problems…Any kind of help will be appreciated…Thanks in Advance!!

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I am only challenge question old. But what I have learnt from it is that it’s all about tweaking your solution to the greatest of depth you can do with your knowledge keeping various possible test cases in mind such that your overall solution is as close to perfection as possible. Most of the top coders in codechef donate almost a week getting to it so that even .001 points they will earn from it can matter them in topping the charts as almost 20 30 people every time solves 9 question and its only the challenge problem that decides the winner.

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I also agree , i also wanted to know what kind of approach is needed to solve or compete in challenging problem

Well, I gave this challenge problem… apparently less than a day, and got 10th place (on 20% of the data, but unless the rest is totally different, it should correlate with my final points).

Winning isn’t everything, especially if it’s by 0.001 points. As for me, I’d rather use 10 days to upsolve 20 hard binary-scored problems from various topics (moderate pace) than one challenge problem, simply because I can learn more that way - and I have a lot of problems on which I could learn a lot, but too little time to do that.

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@xellos0 It’s a good thing that you don’t do so. But if you look at the submissions of most of the toppers you will find that they have made most number of submissions for the challenge problem only… This thing tells a lot and we can clearly speculate what’s going in their mind…

It’s a good idea to make a lot of submissions, because (apparently) the best submission counts. The more times you try with small modifications, the better the chances of having some submission which scores higher.

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