The Star Quest
24 May 2016Exactly one month ago I started a quest on taking down each and every starred problem of the Competitive Programming (CP) book selected from the UVa online judge website. My objective with this endeavor is straightforward: keep my algorithmic skills sharp. I set out by making myself solve at least one problem a day. This sort of approach does not usually work well with me, because at some point along the way I’ll forget to solve a problem, and then I’ll just never remember to get back to it; ever. In practice, however, though I may have been skipping a day or two from time to time, I often end up solving more than one problem. All in all I’d say, given my objectives and my constraints, things have been going pretty well.
The following graph will help illustrate and allow us to better visualize the progress of this little quest of mine. Before beginning this I had solved exactly 51 problems, which led me to world ranking 16k in UVa. We see that now, a month from starting the project, I’ve solved 102 problems, twice what I started from, bringing me to the 8.6k rank. That’s some 50 problems in some 30 days; pretty good to me.