Hi. I find that many of the questions have incomplete information and contain incomplete test cases that inlude what is mentioned in the problem statement and these example test cases on explain them and miss out important details from the problem set that leads to wrong answers and the feature debug my code does not help except give one question with answer at a time.
I find that this codechef philosophy is counterintuitive and unproductive considering the yearly fee that they charge. I have asked for a full refund.
I hope they come out honest on their standing.
Thanks.
what do you mean by that? I have encountered badly worded problems, but I have yet to find an unsolvable problem on codechef. Feel free to link an example. I don’t doubt that problems like this can exist, but they should be rare and quickly fixed.
the purpose of example test cases is not to cover all details of a problem. Not covering all edge cases, for example, is common on codechef, codeforces, leetcode, atcoder and probably more cp platforms I don’t use.
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Dear Friend.
Consider the code
MINNOO
Minimum Number of Ones
I have been given the task for selecting my own binary string and I can always select one string with all 0’s except the last 1. This case will always pass my test and I wont be able to identify what test cases you consider. Still given the question, I am supposed to entitiled the correct solution in every question.
There are many other problems where I encountered the issue of incomplete information and with incomplete information, I dont mean boundary conditions. Dont get me wrong here. There is a difference between incomplete information in questions and boundary conditions.
Let me know if you need more examples.
Thanks.
Generally for any problem on CodeChef, if you feel the statement is incomplete or you are not able to understand the problem fully, the best solution is to read the Sample test case explanation. They clearly explain how the sample test cases need to be solved.
If you look at the explanation of the first test case for this problem MINNOO, you will find this:
Test case 1: One possible binary string is 010101. This has three 1’s, and it can be verified that the maximum of any two adjacent characters is 1.
Achieving this with less than three 1’s is not possible.
This explanation clearly states that for N=6, you cannot solve it by using less than 3 ones. Thus making your current solution wrong.
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If you are new to programming, you will make a lot of mistakes and understand a lot of stuff wrong. A common phenomenon is, that newbies tend to blame the compiler or the language when they are the ones causing errors.
I see the same happening with you right now. Don’t get me wrong, cp statements can be very unintuitive for beginners, simply because the statements are often phrased in a mathematical way. But you need them to be phrased that way, because later statements will be even more abstract and mathematical. This is a normal learning curve for competitive programming.
The problem mentioned by you, to my honest opinion, sounds well phrased.
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