chenmark's blog

By chenmark, history, 8 years ago, In English

Update: Due to popular request, we created a script for you to generate your own rating profile. For detailed instructions, refer to our ui page on github. We plan to rewrite our code in Javascript to expand functionality, but hopefully this is helpful in the meantime. Please let us know if you have any suggestions!

This project was written jointly with yj12.

Several heuristics exist for finding suitable practice problems on Codeforces. One common piece of advice is to sort all problems by the number of solvers and to work down the list. However, the number of solvers depends on a number of factors, including the recency of the contest, and the date and time the contest was held. Another heuristic is to try to solve problems at a certain level, for instance, all Div. 1 C problems. However, the difficulty of such problems can vary greatly from contest to contest.

We decided to create a better measure of problem difficulty, which we’ll call “problem rating”. Problem rating is an integral value, with higher problem ratings reflecting harder problems. In order for the rating to be meaningful, we made it mathematically compatible with user ratings. Technically, problem rating is the rating of a hypothetical contestant such that his/her expected rank equals the number of participants who solved the problem. In practice, if you meet a problem whose rating is equal to your rating, you are expected to solve it in half of your contests.

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