I don’t mind math in problems, but perhaps try to cover it behind some storyline :). I freak out when i see half the Greek alphabet in the formulas of a problem statement :).
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Yes, thats a valid point. Giving away straight formula (much worse, giving away all those symbols which we dont know) is bad.
One of his point was Huge jump between 5 and 6 problems solved.. If you make first 5 easier and last 5 harder, you are just increasing the gap.
What you guys can do is, first 5 should be easy, 1st=cakewalk and 5th= EASY-MEDIUM. The difficulty should gradually increase, not like 5 problems done by 2000 and 6th problem only by 200.
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Use the rating predictor, it’s extremely accurate:
https://discuss.codechef.com/questions/100887/codechef-rating-predictor
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Next time I’ll try to come up with interesting story lines… It’s not that easy XD
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Yes, I understand that. But anything will work. Some humor, something related to some issue, or any random story/situation coming to your mind. Problem story is one thing where setter can unleash the writer within 
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thanks a ton! Awesome scrip!!
Dont have enough credits to upvote 
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STRINGRA had no “Story” as well, so that example is not actually relevant in “problem should not have a story”. In fact, you have yourself given a counter example, that stating statements mathematically makes it tough to understand.
(I hope you arent saying that “Chef constructed this graph, but then lost the sequence A, as well as all the labels on the graph. So all he has left is a directed graph” is the story there, because plainly there are 3 paragraphs of all mathematical definitions and stuff)
Also you cannot rule out that setter intentionally kept the language tough to raise the bar
PS: My comment is directed towards your statement “start working than a problem having "Ramayan", "Mahabharat", "History", "Drama",” because personally I dont find a little story here and there giving trouble in interpretting the question. Either way, its how the mathematical stuff etc. is put up, which is part of problem statement but not “Story”
I guess the setter tried to describe it mathematically in that String problem but he didn’t put it that clearly. All of the problems in this contest were clear and direct. For example, people complain about the delta symbol here. Actually, the setter just tried to be very direct here as the symbols used are actually used to denote diagonals of Pascal’s and Sierpinski’s triangle. So in a way, it was very clear and also gave some hints.
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It was clear to people who know those symbols. I for instance, was literally like “WTF, where did this triangle come from?! What is this triangle?”
To me it was more like " John buys 6 apples, eats 5 of them. How many apples does Smith have?"
I think perhaps it was clear to those who know such symbols and things. I think we are both at a different perspective here, and both of our perspective matter. Ideally the statement should be a middle-way of both the extremes 
I agree. May be there should have been some more examples. Especially, it would help testing our code. That little test case in the WEASELTX problem seemed pretty simple to me as it was passing for every wrong code I try to start with. I tried to solve that problem, in 5 different ways (50) every time though. I was always getting that little test case getting passed (even with wrong code).
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Sometimes the setters just decide to be more evil XD . Because considerable efforts need to be put to find such a weak test case which passes many wrong solution.
@r_64 , I prefer questions with no storys at all. Story requires more work to transform the question in its ‘pure analytic’ form.
I see divided opinions regarding the problem statement formulation, which is fine. To each his own :).
Fact is however, that this problem set had 5 solvable and 5 impossible problems for more than 97% of the coders. Just think about that :).
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Some possible reasons:
- Usually the input/output is tedious to implement
- Even if you implement a simple solution you can’t be sure how much you will score, so it doesn’t seem worth it.
- There was a huge math formula
- I like to leave challenge problem for last, and simply lost interest after i couldn’t solve more than 5 problems.
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^ Complete list of how I felt towards challenge problems not long ago, before I realized it’s not as tedious or unrewarding as it appears.
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That’s a motivating comment
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