This is my first long challenge. I read that long challenges are especially useful for beginners to learn a new concept and apply it to problems. Quoting the homepage of June Long Challenge,
What’s in it for you?
The idea behind these programming contests is that we want you to learn while competing. Also we believe that it is alright to refer to tutorials, books and other materials, learn a concept and then apply the same to solve a problem during a contest.
But I noticed that the challenges do not have topic tags. I got three problems from June long challenge. If I want to solve the others, how do I know whether I know the topic required for solving the problem (and if I do not know the topic, what is the topic to be learnt). I personally feel that if a problem involves a new topic and I do not know it, it will be a waste of time trying different unfruitful approaches to the problem.
Thanks
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If you don’t know the topic, you can always either try to work it out for yourself, or explore it on the internet. Either way you are sure to learn something.
If you don’t know a topic, then you will try out many more topics than you even need to solve that problem, thus learning even more. The only thing you need is the will to learn. Even if you are not able to solve a problem during the contest because of not knowing which topic it was from, you can solve it after the contest ends (as topics and editorials etc, are released after the contest). It turns out that at times, we think that the topic should already be known because of the frustration of not being able to solve many problems but that is okay as we eventually improve.
During contests, if you couldn’t able to find the topic of a problem, try to apply mathematics or google, problem related stuff, even if you won’t able to solve that problem, you would end up learning something new or improving problem solving skills, and that’s the main purpose of contest.
tags will be added later after contest
otherwise everyone will try the same approach
without tag u will get to learn even more new stuffs frm other fellow programmers
actually determining algorithm/data struc required to solve a prob is a skill
its better not to ruin it by adding tags during contest
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