BiggEr.'s blog

By BiggEr., history, 3 years ago, In English

I am regularly giving contests on codeforces for the last few months now, and I have started to see how problem setters always try to come up with something new which most of the people will see for the first time. It's a good thing but sometimes the problem actually goes far away from anything that would make sense due to the added complexities.

Whereas some problems although they have appeared somewhere else, actually teach some serious stuff to the person who saw it for the first time.

So, my request is to come up with some weekly/monthly(as you wish) old classic contest or practice gym which would feature problems that teach something to newcomers and would be a nice refresher for the old OGs.

I know there are a bunch of platforms already doing this but codeforces has it's own legacy when it comes to anything around competetive programming, so this would be a nice thing.

If these contests are made rated, I agree that rating or color will lose relevance as there will be a lot of cheaters, so we can find a way around for that but for the majority of the people, these contests will be helpful. Also, there would be less blogs where beginners keep asking for help and experienced ones keep writing the word PRACTICE.

Moreover, we can see a lot of problem setters who would propose problems because this time they do not have the pressure to be unique. This initiative would help those who start CP, see fancy things like Segment tree beats, and what not, try learning it and eventually give up!!

That was it for now. I wrote this because problems like: https://codeforces.com/contest/219/problem/D has around 5k solves whereas if it was recent this number could have easily been 3x or even more. But as of now it is hardly accessible.

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