Thoughts and Motivation

Правка en1, от myst-6, 2024-04-08 22:42:54

Hello Codeforces!

Over the weekend I attended the British Informatics Olympiad final. Today I'd like to share some thoughts on how it was, and my CP journey going forward.

I started programming in general when I was 12; I learned JavaScript from an old book that was lying around in my house and wrote some small websites — as a lot do when starting out — and generally dabbled in whatever interested me.

Through the COVID lockdown I played multiplayer video games with some school friends such as Minecraft, and played various JRPGs with my sister such as Tales of Symphonia. I took a hiatus from programming but towards the end of the lockdown and as in-person school began to start, I decided to pick it back up again.

In April of 2021, I signed up to user:https://www.codewars.com/users/myst-6. I wouldn't describe this website as a competitive programming — problems feel less math-y and (usually) don't require complex algorithms but instead focus on implementation skills and knowledge language features. A personal favourite of mine is https://www.codewars.com/kata/59b4cf87bf10a4cf59000060!

I began with the easier problems, and on my way to climbing the ranks I learned some basic algorithms like Dijkstra's and A*, and some simple DP like knapsacks. I hit the second-highest rank, 1 dan, just before my 16th birthday.

When I first discovered the British Informatics Olympiad (BIO) at the start of 2022 when it was advertised by a newly-hired computer science teacher at my school, I tried some past papers and was surprised by my relatively consistent high scores. I decided to go straight for it, not knowing much about CP.

Luckily, the second question was an implementation-heavy problem similar to many Codewars questions I had done before, and I scored highly on it! I ended up right on the lower end of the score threshold and was invited to the finals. I was overjoyed, yet did not expect much; when I attempted the past questions on the website, I could barely solve any of them and didn't know where to find resources. In the email invitation, we were suggested to use the [https://usaco.training/](USACO training gateway)

История

 
 
 
 
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  Rev. Язык Кто Когда Δ Комментарий
en6 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 23:37:57 82 Tiny change: 'ting me:\n- [user:' -> 'ting me:\n\n- [user:' (published)
en5 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 23:35:16 1423 Tiny change: 'ed up to [user:https://ww' -> 'ed up to [https://ww'
en4 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 23:20:57 0 Reverted to en2
en3 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 23:20:22 0 Tiny change: 'o.training/](USACO tr' -> 'o.training](USACO tr'
en2 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 23:20:22 5053 Tiny change: 'o.training/](USACO tr' -> 'o.training](USACO tr'
en1 Английский myst-6 2024-04-08 22:42:54 2227 Initial revision (saved to drafts)