Problems that take ICPC world finalists a few hours to solve would take less advanced students weeks to solve.
That’s how hard World Finals-caliber problems are.
ICPC Challenge Director David Sturgill said one of the hardest steps in solving the problems is simply understanding the prompt. Some teams get stuck there and can’t see the algorithm hidden in the text.
Then the next step is to “connect understanding the problem to an algorithm you already know,” Sturgill said.
You can have all of the mathematical knowledge in the world, but you must know how to utilize that information to write the code and solve the problem.
Take a look at the problems, if you dare.
The problem set for the 2013 World Finals is live online. You can view all the problems here (.pdf file).
Keep up with the scores by visiting the online scoreboard at http://myicpc5.icpcnews.com/ (or http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/) and following @ICPCAnalyst on Twitter.
Dioni L. Wise for ICPCNews
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