robin_0's blog

By robin_0, history, 8 years ago, In English

IPSC is back again after a year. And on the eve of IPSC I can't forget a memory I made participating in IPSC. Last year I participated in IPSC for the first time. I had just started competitive programming for a while and when I was still in a juvenile state IPSC came. So I did participated in it. This brought such a funny memory in my life I can't ever forget :v

Unfortunately I am not from CS background so I didn't know much about algorithms and complexities back then :/ (which I still don't know much about :3 ) . And this lack of knowledge gave me that experience :V .

So when I was solving the problems , the first problem was a greedy one and it was easy to solve. But when I was solving the 2nd problem , I being completely novice wrote an O(n^3) algorithm or what I can't remember properly to solve it.Now for the easy sub problem n was <=50 so it was done in the blink of an eye. Now the funny part came when it was for the hard sub problem . For the hard sub problem n was <=10000.

But being unaware of time complexities and thinking to myself "Hey it's not constrained to 1 sec so who cares. How long is it going to take at most maybe 1 minutes or 2. Still no big deal" :V

So I being confident started executing my code and thought of waiting for a minute or two.

But 3 minutes passed ... 5 minutes passed ... 10 minutes passed ... 30 minutes passed ... 1 hour passed.

Still my code wasn't done executing :3

Now the contest time was going away and I was waiting and waiting. Then I was wondering " This is why in movies we see hackers with so many computers ". On that time I was hoping to have another pc to solve other problems. And I can remember that I was so much motivated to solve I even tried to solve the easy sub problem of another problem by hand :v .

After 5 hours the contest was over but still my code was running and running :v Being completely annoyed I terminated it :v

Later I learnt my mistake but still whenever I hear something about IPSC I can't get the memory of that day out of my mind :v

I don't know in which way my life will go , in which direction my problem solving career will go. But one thing for sure I'll never forget this day :v

Thank you for reading this long post , I derived pleasure sharing this with you :)

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