I have written a blog post on how to solve Facebook Hacker Cup Round 1 problem Autocomplete using a trie. This is a beginner level article and is meant for those who want to know what a trie is and how to use it in programming problems.

Here's the link: http://blog.anirudhrb.com/2015/02/introduction-to-tries-through-facebook.html

Enjoy!

PS: If you are not a beginner, please navigate away from this page immediately and DON'T CLICK ON DOWNVOTE! :P

Since the official editorial is not yet out I have taken the liberty to write an editorial for the div. 2 hard problem in SRM 641.

Problem discussion: ShufflingCardsDiv2

I need some help with a problem.

You are given a set S and a list L of subsets of S. L need not contain all subsets of S. Is it possible to pick some subsets from L such that they are pairwise disjoint and their union is S?

Note: It is not important to find those subsets. What is important is to be able to determine whether it is possible or not.

Amrita School of Engineering, Bengaluru is organizing it's first ever programming contest as a part of it's national level technical festival Ekatva 2014. The contest will be hosted on Codechef. Only teams participating onsite are eligible for prizes although everyone is invited to participate.

I am the problem setter for the contest. Special thanks to PraveenDhinwa for helping.

Time: November 7th 1400 hours IST to 1630 hours IST

Contest link: http://www.codechef.com/COQU2014/

Good luck!

I have discussed a solution to problem 1225-Flags from Timus OJ on my blog. This is a beginner-level dp problem and I have tried to explain the solution as intuitively as possible.

http://theanirudhrb.blogspot.com/2014/10/problem-discussion-timus-oj-1225-flags.html

I am always open to feedback!

Have a nice day!

I just published a tutorial on Disjoint-set data structures using UVa 10583 Ubiquitous Religions as a sample problem. Do read and give feedback.

http://theanirudhrb.blogspot.in/2014/09/introduction-to-disjoint-set-data.html

Have a nice day!

I have written a blog post about the problem describing how to solve it.

http://theanirudhrb.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/problem-discussion-spoj-tower-of-babylon-babtwr/ (Shortlink: http://wp.me/p2x8Gw-x)

I need help in solving 441E - Valera and Number. The editorial was very brief. I am a beginner and am not very familiar with such problems.

A few days ago, all of a sudden, I wanted to make my own Java code library for programming contests. But it is really difficult and time consuming to make code library from scratch. Also, I have noticed that Java implementations of algorithms are more difficult to find than C++ ones and that is all the more reason to create one's own Java code library. After a lot of searching, I found a really good code library on Google Code to base my own code library on. I thought of sharing this library with everyone here.

yaal — Yet Another Algorithm Library

I believe the code library belongs to the user Egor.

I am gonna take ideas from that and implement my own because this one doesn't suit my tastes. I think it can be made much simpler.

Have a nice day!

Its been a really bad day today. My performance in round #218 was disastrous. My brain was almost shut down for the first hour. Then somehow it started working (but not as efficiently as I wanted). I made my first submission at the 58 minute mark to the A problem. (Yeah, you can call me a n00b. I earned it.) Then inspiration struck for the B problem and I quickly coded it. But I overlooked a critical condition which led to my solution being hacked. Needless to say I didn't try any other problems. I was more keen on hacking others' problems for the last 30 mins.

After my solution B was hacked, I quickly realized what went wrong. After the end of the contest, I resubmitted the solution and it got Accepted. All I had to do was to put a simple if block. :(