Imbalance of Difficulty level in January Challenge 2018

Completely agreed, but you could assume Solving 30 points in monster as an independent question since it had such a big impact on ranking. To go for partial points or solve the hard question that you are stuck in during the last couple of days is the dilemma at the end. High risks, high rewards.

+1 to the brute dijkstra. I remember some of the first year juniors in my college, who didn’t encounter graph theory in their curriculum yet, got aware of dijkstra’s algorithm and implemented it. I believe that bruteforce was the only motivation for them to learn a completely unknown algorithm which will be of use to them for sure in the coming years.

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Exactly, thats why long is considered a good contest for learning things.

@dushsingh1995 even I was unaware of that. I got 5 only :stuck_out_tongue: should’ve used python ahh :\

@dushsingh1995 I got 5 in Python and now I am sad :stuck_out_tongue:

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To add, I found the scoring distribution in the challenge problem quite weird. Only 3 are having ~100 pts, whereas rest all are having <3 pts.

I agree with @vijju123. If somebody does not attempt partials and scores less than he could have potentially, I don’t see how that is a fault of the system.

@avi224 that is due the scoring mechanism. I think it is not satisfactory, and I have already pointed it out to the organizers.

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Well, there are questions like you said which helps beginners but most of the times its not the case. Anyways, I kinda agree as its enough argument to keep them.

[Below is not a counter argument] :v

Though, I would personally like to believe there will be people who won’t like to waste time writing these brutes and system is not going to change because proportion of people believing that if “Anyone can get those points then let it be” is much more.

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 I would personally like to believe there will be people who won't like to waste time writing these brutes 

I dont quite get you here. If writing brute is time waste for you, then just code the full solution. Else if its like “I dont know full solution, I can get brute force points but I dont want to write brute force” then it seems weird considering that one wants to do his best in a contest.

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I cant comment on rating system. But AFAIK, someone who succeeded in solving 6th was under 200. What you pointed is true, that the gap between brute forcing and full solving is just a few hundreds instead of what is was in earlier contests. Thats a fair point. I am sad that there are quite few issues in the first contest of year itself. :frowning: (And considering that dp isnt my strongest topics and that the contest had multiple problems on dp…Well, XD)

Well, that’s why I said its what I would like to personally believe (others can believe else of course) , as personally I prefer long for or in general other contests for learning something whereas doing this doesn’t help in that. At the same time, why do I care then? Because I want my rating to be an indicator of my performance. That’s sums it up as I have the freedom to believe this way. If I can’t write full solution I don’t believe in writing brute solutions which don’t require any thinking. If you think that’s not “Giving my best”, you can think so.

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@vijju123 I didn’t use any DPs, and I solved 7 :stuck_out_tongue: (I solved the first 5 at the beginning, so I don’t quite remember them, but that is some really is DP if it is DP)

Thats cool! For monster I was just stuck on how to update and what to do- no data structure directly supported it and yeah, I didnt went over in direction of SOS dp.

For humongous, man, meet in the middle and everything was quite clear, but I couldnt frame an expression to find “X” (number of humongous strings in a string) and that was bad. Real bad :frowning: .

Well, more questions to push into the upsolver-stack XD

i said unbalance was unfair. But I think 1 or 2 questions having trivial brute is okay (only if newcomers learn). Yes, in this contest, there was nothing much to learn from brute forces. I’m talking about long contests in general (from the past where there were nice subtasks).

Well, since the last line of your question asked for suggestions, I gave mine. Didn’t mean to offend anyone.

If you think that's not "Giving my best", you can think so

@shubhiks shouldn’t have asked for suggestions if you can’t digest others point of view lol

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Actually I asked for suggestions on how to handle this imbalance (not on whether I should attempt them or not),so strictly speaking yours wasn’t a suggestion; further I never said I would be able to digest your suggestion, it ain’t food after all! (:

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"I dont know full solution, I can get brute force points but I dont want to write brute force" then it seems weird considering that one wants to do his best in a contest.

I strongly agree with @vijju123 's point up there :stuck_out_tongue:

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What you said is true. But again, there are cases where the smaller sub tasks are weak and that one cannot rely on them (Problem 4 of this long itself is an example). Ultimately one needs to try be capable to give proof of correctness of his algorithm, we cannot rely on setter for anything. (Who knows, he might be an evil one :3 )

But aside from that, I agree with what you said. :slight_smile:

@vijju123 After reading after it, turns out my monster solution is basically SOS DP, or at least uses the same idea. I’m not too good at judging whether a solution should be called DP or not. It feels pretty cool though to reinvent this :stuck_out_tongue:

Hahaha…
Yes, you are right totally, we cannot say what setter has in his mind. Sometimes, Maybe that practice might make the problem tougher and interesting in its own way, we cannot say.

Btw, don’t worry, I took care of the intricacies in the small sub-task too :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

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