What’s the best way to practice for codechef contests? I feel like codeforces has a lot of resources on the internet dedicated to it but not so much for Codechef.
Other than upsolving contests, what other resources have been helpful to increase your rating?
I’ve never tried Codeforces, so I can’t comment on them. But I practice here on Codechef. The Old Practice Page (codechef.com) is full of problems that you can filter and focus on what you want to practice.
I mean, I have the PRO, but I guess you mean free resources. The paid version is actually cool. It took me from ~1000 to 1600 in less than 3 months.
I went from creating an account to 1700 in exactly 3 - 5 contests without practice and without prior CP knowledge. But I have been stuck in 1700 - 1750 range for 3 months lol.
Practice in codechef is quite tough, I couldn’t filter or sort by contest ID, the contests are from long form contests as well, the truth is practicing recent problems have the best representation in future contests but it seems like we cannot choose to just practice recent problems other than the recent page which only contains few latest problems.
You just need to solve 4 problems in any div to grow past that div or solve 3 problems fast enough to get a good rank and get a positive delta.
Since you are in div 2 the 4th problem is usually 1900-2600 rated which involves topics like binary search on answer, dynamic programming, graphs, math(problems involving to apply math get an optimized solution O(n^2)->O(n),O(nlogn) with n begin 10^5 or O(n)->O(logn) with n being approximately greater than 10^8)).
So we have to practice some standard problems based on these topics and learn to see patterns only then we will get past div 2.
So we have to get good at dsa, abstract data types and algorithms and pattern recognition to solve problems with ratings greater than 2000.