Mucosolvan's blog

By Mucosolvan, history, 8 years ago, In English

Hello,

How can I motivate myself to solve algorithmic problems outside of CF rounds? I used to work pretty hard to achieve my level, and now I try to take part in every CF round I can, but I'm not working on tasks outside of that. If I know a problem has a listed solution somewhere I give up after a while, or even when I get the solution right I don't code it. Similarly I know the ideas behind algorithms and structures I have never written, so even if I notice the pattern I'm stuck. How do you "fight" with issues like that? :)

Thanks in advance

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8 years ago, # |
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Sometimes, I have that issue also. What I'm doing right now is sorting the problemset by number solved, and decide to solve the problems going down with no hesitation whatsoever. In my opinion, I think the reason why we don't want to write the code to a solution, etc is because we only want to choose problems that seem satisfying when complete. With this method, you're able to just blindly do problems and not think about the satisfaction that you get from completing the problem. Anyways, that was just my opinion, so see what you think. Hope this helps.

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8 years ago, # |
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Take it like a game. I assume you like getting high ratings at Codeforces. That's why you get motivated to write codes for problems in a round. To keep myself motivated in offline practice, what I do is, I keep a google sheet where I update all the problems every day. By all I mean the problems where I feel a sense of achievement after solving it. Like I have learnt a new trick or I have gained more confidence by solving it. I try to keep the average number of problems solved each day to be 1.5 . So the days, where I solve 2 or more than 2 problems, I feel like that was a good day. The days where I solve 1 or 0 problems, I feel bad about myself and the next day I get more motivated to make up for the last day.

This is my game. I am competing against myself. The average value of number of problems solved is the "rating" for me. And I believe, if everyday I'm solving 2 problems that are slightly above my comfort zone, hopefully my comfort zone would shift upwards in a good pace.