TIPS TO REACH DIVISION 1

I think by practice questions of previous short contest …we can become good at short contests.

Easy way is obviously by just doing long challenge, If you look at my profile you can see that I could’ve easily become 5 star if i only did long challenge but if you wanna actually improve i suggest you do short ones too

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I do the opposite way. I participate only in short contests because I can’t give that much time which a long challenge requires.

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Can you please give some tips for INOI? I want to go to IOITC this year :slightly_smiling_face:

Practice questions(mainly dp and graph theory based) and solve problems based on those questions.

Topics For INOI
Binary Search

A very important topic for INOI. Little less stress is put on this, but questions which involve binary search and upper bound (or lower bound) as a prerequisite are common in INOI

Dynamic Programming

Practice hard on this, because at least one question related to this comes in every INOI. On CodeForces you should do 1700-2000 rated dp questions. According to me that is the INOI bounds for dp

Graph Theory

Another very important topic. They don’t go into depths like path traversal and all. Just implementation of dfs and bfs with some restrictions, shortest paths (all 3 algorithms), topological sorting and understanding the tree data structure is enough. Make sure you know their implementation very well.

Debugging the code

This says it all. You need to need to know the bug in your code. You should be easily able to debug the code within 10 minutes. I will give you an example.

INOI 2020, I was sitting in the examination room with only 100 points(I did the harder one, lol) and 10 mins left. I was figuring out what was wrong with my question, and verifying it with my working. All seemed fine. Then I realized that I forgot to call a function that had to initialize all the arrays to their initial values. That was the most frustrating moment, and then I got an AC for 35 points (that is what I was trying for initially). I didn’t have time to submit the 100 points solution for that question. Only if I had found that error even 5 minutes ago, I could have submitted the solution for 100 points(coz I had an outline of that). I ended up with 135, and being in class 9 I managed to qualify.

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Thanks a lot :+1:

abhayp001