Yesterday, I took part in Rayan Programming Contest 2024 getting 8th place and becoming LGM.

I first got LGM more than 2 years go in September 2022 in Round #819 but there was a copied problem and the round got unrated. After that I took a break from CP and then I was off to NS. I didn’t really train much. Honestly, I am a bit surprised at my performance in codeforces round. It seems that I am still improving in CP without much training? Maybe doing math textbooks improves my thinking? Idk.

Well, even though my performance in this contest seems good cause I got 8th place, I still feel like I made a lot of mistakes in this round.

  • D: I thought we could swap 0 and 2 so I thought this was literally implementing IOI DNA. After I realized that we cannot do that, then I took super long to figure out how to construct for 2 2 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 0
  • E: Given a permutation $p$, how to find permutation $q$ such that $p_i+q_i$ is constant? Obviously $q_i := n-p_i+1$. But during contest I decided that $q$ is the reverse of $p$ is correct. That is $q_{n-i+1} := p_i$. I asked it in AC later and apparently many people also made this thinking bug (including another LGM…) I guess this is the new “Is ()() a palindrome” problem. Also I got caught on $n=k=1$
  • H: I had the idea quickly but I suck at implementation. I also had to constant opt because of my subpar implementation. But tbh, this is not a very good problem.

Even though even I started CP, I thought that LGM would be the pinnacle of CP. But even now, I still don’t feel like I can confidently say I am one of the best competitive programmers in the world despite being the 27-th highest rated person. As the old saying goes “CP starts at [insert your rating here]”.

Another thing I want to say is that when you start competitive programming, you know there is this guy called tourist and he is really good. But I don’t think people understand how stupidly good tourist is. Like I had a performance that was 3500-elo rated here and tourist still took half the time I took to solve A-F2 and H compared to me. Even though I am LGM now, I seriously still cannot comprehend how insanely good at CP one must be to compete with tourist… Even if I did not make the mistakes above, would I even come close to tourist’s performance in this round?

Anwyays, now that I have achieved CF LGM, my goals are for competitive programming are now:

  1. Take selfie with Um_nik
  2. ICPC Gold
  3. CF Top 10
  4. AtCoder WTF

These are probably in increasing order of difficulty. Let’s see how that goes.

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