comingsoon.cpp's blog

Is this problem really a 1600 problem
By comingsoon.cpp, history, 5 days ago, In English

I've been trying to solve problems way above my rating, giving myself 2 days max before looking for help, and yesterday i solved this problem 1978D - Elections , Problem D from last D2 round. According to the problem rating, it's a 1600 problem, that would mean it's 2X my current rating but i think it's not even a 1000 problem. What would you rate this problem? I don't want to be feel like I'm improving when I'm not. Are there any websites or tools one can use in getting reliable rating for codeforces problems?

  • Vote: I like it
  • +6
  • Vote: I do not like it

»
5 days ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +29 Vote: I do not like it

You should remember that the rating assigned to problems is estimated from an aggregate statistic, and not individual submissions — individual contributions to the difficulty estimate become less important as more and more people solve a problem.

Meanwhile, your perception of difficulty is a single datapoint, which has much higher variance. A lot of it is also dependent on whether you "see" the solution immediately or not. And we can't discount the fact that people learn different topics at different rates.

So don't think too much about the difficulty being correct or not — focus on solving problems outside your comfort zone. A good way is to go into the problem without knowing the topic and after you solve it, look at the tags and the rating to get an idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are. Then figure out whether it was a knowledge issue or a skill issue, and work on it accordingly.

CF ratings feel a bit hit-or-miss in the lower ends (or maybe it's just my own bias), but statistically they're not unusable. If you want other rating systems, clist.by has some problem ratings that you can look at and judge for yourself. I haven't used any rating system for CF problems other than the CF system itself personally.

→ Reply
  • »
    »
    5 days ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Thanks

    → Reply
»
5 days ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

I wasn't able to solve it when I first tried. ;_;

→ Reply
  • »
    »
    4 days ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Lolzz, took me 5 wrong submissions before I got it correct though, mainly because i misunderstood the problem statement.

    → Reply
»
5 days ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

so why you solve it 2 days?

→ Reply
»
4 days ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

Different people are good at different types of problems. I got stuck on that problem during the contest for 30 minutes and decided to do E first before I saw the solution.

→ Reply