R#12

The game came out to be much tougher than I ever imagined.

The training camp at gzez has just concluded. It is the right time to make a conclusion for the senior 1 season.

One year ago, I was struggling to solve even the first problem in a NOI round. At that time, I was only a noob, with a rating of 1971 on Codeforces. I craved for improvement, and trained hard.

During my hard training in whole senior 1, I've surely made significant improvements. My Codeforces rating went from barely CM level to consistent GM. My knowledge structure became much more comprehensive, especially in data structures (credits to the great Ynoi). I could now solve the first problem in NOI contests, sometimes with a little struggle. There's truly a great feeling of satisfaction and achievement.

This June, we went training in gzez. A lot of strong participants gathered around to do contests together in full concentration. I looked forward to the contests, hope to get a great result as a certificate for one whole year's training.

The ranklist turned out to be ultra astonishing.

I had to accept a fact - my strength now is still no where near NOI gold.

In all these contests, I never got into the first 10 in rankings. In my best contest, the prob B was a giant DS and I managed to solve it. However, it took me so much time that I had no time for any subtasks in prob C. The result was 200 points and was close to the rank 10 line. Unfortunately, some participants were able to solve B much faster, and therefore outranked me by extra subtasks solved in prob C. In the other contests, I wasn't even close. I even missed prob A (by completely being stupid) in one or two.

The upsolving process was tough - hard as hell. Most of the time the problems I couldn't solve in contests were very very complicated and almost impossible to upsolve for me, since they just take impractical time to debug. I normally spent hours to debug just one piece of code, however after debugging the code were still full of bugs.

Strategy is also a big problem - most of us didn't really pay attention to it in regular training contests. In fact, regular training contests were treated as seperate problems to solve by most of us. This, I believe that it's an OKish way to train since it maximizes the numbers I solve and the time I spent thinking. However, now the NOI 2025 is around the corner, and I need to pay attention to my contest strategy.

Other parts of the training camp - lectures, problem sharing, etc., weren't really fun for me. I spent most of the time doing past Ynoi rounds.

Now the goal for me is clear: To become competitive when the next season arrives.

To achieve such goal, I believe there is only two points.

Solve more problems. Codeforces, Atcoder and UOJ are all good platforms with hard problems in different styles. There are also classic and great problemsets like Ynoi. The single effective strategy for me should be grinding problems in every of them en masse. In senior 1, I've been grinding the intermediate problems in those platforms, which as a result made me much stronger. Now, in senior 2, I will repeat the same strategy, but with the hardest problems.

Take regular training contests. Treat them as real contests, where your only goal is to acquire as much points as possible. As the senior 2 season arrives, a good contest strategy becomes more and more important. I need to be prepared for a contest at any time. In my senior 1 grade, I made significant blunders in almost every mainline contest due to badly prepared strategy. I need to make sure this doesn't happen in any more contests.

There's no need to write any more here. One sentence: the one who writes the most problems wins.

The food and accomodation didn't leave me any impression. Only thing I could remember is the wild weather that makes me mad. So I will skip it here.