This article has been machine-translated from Chinese. The translation may contain inaccuracies or awkward phrasing. If in doubt, please refer to the original Chinese version.
During this extraordinarily long summer vacation caused by the pandemic, we couldn’t hold in-person training camps, so we could only work through the problem sets curated by our seniors online. We had to rely mostly on self-study, and due to various factors of being at home, I actually slacked off quite a bit. Here I’ll summarize what I learned during this summer.
Before the summer, the algorithms I had mastered were very few — only enumeration, greedy algorithms, binary search, union-find, and basic dynamic programming from the winter Blue Bridge Cup training. I hadn’t solved many problems either. During this summer, following the problem sets and recommended blog posts from our seniors, we covered a total of 8 topics: segment trees, shortest paths, minimum spanning trees, KMP, game theory, strongly connected components, bipartite matching, and network flow. The difficulty increased as we progressed, going from solving 4-5 problems a day to 2-3. Among these, I mastered the first three topics most solidly and also learned a fair amount about game theory. However, the last few topics remained at the level of understanding the principles, watching videos, typing out the templates once, and being able to solve a few problems using the templates. I hope to revisit these topics in the new semester to solidify my understanding. Time flew by while solving problems — I’d often start working on problems or enter a contest and forget to eat, going at it for hours on end. The happiest moments were seeing AC (Accepted), but most of the time it was a bunch of WA (Wrong Answer) or TLE (Time Limit Exceeded), or various bizarre and magical errors. After each debugging session, I’d wonder how I could have made such mistakes. I hope my future self can be more careful, patient, and focused when solving problems, rather than repeatedly making the same careless mistakes. At the same time, participating in multi-university contests with the seniors this summer made me increasingly aware of my own shortcomings — I could only solve the easiest sign-in problems. Watching the seniors in the group chat practicing themed problem sets and discussing strategies for the multi-university contests really inspired me, as they were always working hard.
In other competitions during this summer, I only managed a third-place prize in the Zhisuan Contest. Other contests either left me devastated or I missed them due to scheduling conflicts. So I especially hope to achieve good results in the Blue Bridge Cup and CCF competitions in the new semester, and for that, I need to practice even harder. Just as I thought before joining the training — the more you study, the more you can appreciate the wisdom of those who came before and realize your own weaknesses, and the more you want to keep learning. I need to measure up to the experts around me. Let’s keep pushing in the new semester!
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