Psyho Challenge: Where are your likes?

Hello Psyho, this is Mike. We are happy to help with likes. So, Codeforces?

He waits for your likes here: https://twitter.com/FakePsyho/status/1605570944537280512?t=MV0OksdeUb8FXKApncDZcw&s=19

I believe that 40 facts are too few for us. We need more!

• 19 hours ago, # ^ | Or tomorrow...

  • 19 hours ago, # ^ | Yes, I am agree with you. (●'◡'●)

  • 17 hours ago, # ^ | Or until the end of the year (maybe year 2023)

• 17 hours ago, # ^ |

• 16 hours ago, # ^ | You and I both :')

• 16 hours ago, # ^ | May be THIS can help you.

• 13 hours ago, # ^ | Let me guess. You will choose to be Candidate Master?

  • 12 hours ago, # ^ | Well , I will try to reach it ,not only have the purple color while magic is on

• 15 hours ago, # ^ | ← Rev. 2 →   +11 He's giving advice for optimization and bot programming contests. That's a different type of contest than your normal codeforces round. On codeforces you have about 2.5h for several problems. There are also contests where you have only one problem and a week or even more time to solve it. There is no known best solution, yet you can say that one solution scores higher than another. A classic (and well studied) example is "travelling salesman". You have a salesman who wants to visit a lot of different cities while minimizing travelling time/distance. Of course he could just visit the cities in alphabetical order and it would still be a valid solution. But there are faster routes. We had an optimization problem on codeforces last month. For bot programming go to CodinGame and click "view last battles" to get an idea of what it's about. The contest will run for another 2 weeks.

  • 14 hours ago, # ^ | Ty! Now, it makes much more sense to me.

• 10 hours ago, # ^ | Thanks for increasing visibility! 128 looks like a reasonable number, I'll keep this as my target. I definitely don't want to spend Christmas writing programming tips on twitter. Small announcement for everyone: I'm going to sleep (I know, I lied before), but I'll continue tomorrow (I have few hours to burn). If you have any specific topic or question that you'd like to learn more about, let me know.

• 5 hours ago, # ^ | You are not the only one. I was also more interested in this topic. Psyho, do you think it's difficult to prepare regular (say, one per month) heuristic contests by Codeforces community? You took part in marathons here. What needs to be improved in the system so that we can run the perfect competition like this?

  • 4 hours ago, # ^ | I think the codeforces platform is already capable of handling a heuristic contest. For final standing I highly recommend system testing (running the solutions on a different set of testcases after the end of the contest). Unfortunately we saw how not to do it in the Huawei contest in September, where the final testcases were too different from the initial ones and some solutions failed with TLE or MLE. That leads me to the second point: provide is a local tester (with testcase generator) so participants can test offline. Topcoder gives you a Java application with a visualizer, atCoder has a webpage from where you can download testcases and upload your solution to analyze step by step. The alternative (no system testing) will result in a lot of submits with almost identical code and some testcase detection to decide which features or random seed to use to make the submission score higher without actually having a better solution. Another point is relative scoring (relative to other contestants or to some upper bound). If the possible score per testcase differs too much, some testcases would just become irrelevant. Topcoder does relative scoring to the highest scoring submission on a testcase. While I think that's the best way to handle it in order to evaluate the strength of different solutions, it might confuse newcomers (your own score can drop, when someone else submits a better solution). AtCoder uses some upper bound and normalizes to it (every testcase could give 100k points in theory, although not always possible in reality — just a rough estimation).

  • 4 hours ago, # ^ | I'd like to have Deadline format because I show good results in it: you calculate all results locally relatively small number of tests (usually 10), each test must be represented as a problem in terms of Codeforces you submit only one archive with answers for all tests, and it's counted as you sent solutions for all problems all tests are random so we don't have to find their structure as is HashCode