@@howtousaco If you don't mind me asking but since this question is specifically from a US open contest, would you consider questions from US open contests to be harder?
@@rabbit-istudios5444 Open is 1 hour longer and the questions are intended to be harder, I'd generally agree, though you do sometimes come across a particularly difficult question during a regular test, or a particularly easy question on the open. Also, generally I think the 1st question is the easiest and the 3rd is the hardest, but again that's not always the case.
@ I find that the questions i struggle with the most are the Ad-Hoc problems. You don't really know how to approach the problem clearly, of course, you make a bunch of test cases and examples and see if you find a pattern but there is no guarantee that you will find the correct solution to it. This is speaking from a junior but some of the problems I encountered , I had to sometimes use Binary Search and Prefix sums on some of the questions which I don't think is supposed to be in Bronze
@@rabbit-istudios5444 There are a bunch of problems that have multiple different approaches. If you're able to solve it with a prefix sum, go for it, but most of the time if that appears to be an approach, there's either a simpler way, or you'll run into an issue when you try to actually use it. Those are the types of problems that lend themselves best to physically modeling them with props and just fiddling around to figure out the mechanics. Sleepy Cow Sorting is a classic example, and for me the easiest way to explain it is to just sort hands of 5-8 random playing cards a bunch of times until you figure out the pattern.
Question is pretty long ngl.
thanks for reminding me! i forgot to put timestamps.
@@howtousaco If you don't mind me asking but since this question is specifically from a US open contest, would you consider questions from US open contests to be harder?
@@rabbit-istudios5444 Open is 1 hour longer and the questions are intended to be harder, I'd generally agree, though you do sometimes come across a particularly difficult question during a regular test, or a particularly easy question on the open. Also, generally I think the 1st question is the easiest and the 3rd is the hardest, but again that's not always the case.
@ I find that the questions i struggle with the most are the Ad-Hoc problems. You don't really know how to approach the problem clearly, of course, you make a bunch of test cases and examples and see if you find a pattern but there is no guarantee that you will find the correct solution to it. This is speaking from a junior but some of the problems I encountered , I had to sometimes use Binary Search and Prefix sums on some of the questions which I don't think is supposed to be in Bronze
@@rabbit-istudios5444 There are a bunch of problems that have multiple different approaches. If you're able to solve it with a prefix sum, go for it, but most of the time if that appears to be an approach, there's either a simpler way, or you'll run into an issue when you try to actually use it. Those are the types of problems that lend themselves best to physically modeling them with props and just fiddling around to figure out the mechanics. Sleepy Cow Sorting is a classic example, and for me the easiest way to explain it is to just sort hands of 5-8 random playing cards a bunch of times until you figure out the pattern.