Ten minutes remaining in the contest, but you’re still a few points short of advancing. Armed with your mighty coding powers, the first straightforward problems fall easily, but the next ones are proving tough nuts to crack. After some incorrect attempts and unsuccessful searches for dumb bugs in the code, you finally decide to read the problem statements one more time. At last, you find an edge case you haven’t considered . You fix the bug with a few quick keystrokes. You upload the source code file…

Pretests passed

You sit back relieved and elated.

Hi there!

I think no one except me ever reads this blog. So I decided to not to go deep in meaning or in more complicated things like the design of the site etc. I am just gonna write here only for myself, at least in a way that is easier to me.

Of course, not every contest is as fortunate as described above. In some cases, you just fail to solve even the easiest 3 problems, where the rating change drop is guaranteed. As you may have already noticed, I have a passion on algorithmic contests, at least for now. Currently, I am at the national team preparation camp in Kazakh-British Technical University in Almaty. Everything except my actual results, is just great, from contests, the teachers make for us, to where the lessons are actually being taught.

Above: Kazakh-British TU (image source: kbtu.kz)

The funny thing here is that, in fact, I would just skip or even fail to solve problems like those, in camp, if I was in my zone of comfort. It appears that, if I really push myself forward, I really can do a more complicated thing than I usually do. Surprisingly, the SAT subject tests results prove the statement above. My results are 650 pts. for Math 2 and 670 pts. for Physics. I expected to have more points for math than physics, cause just one month before the tests, I had almost zero theoretical knowledge in physics. Consequently, I spent a whole month studying physics and annoying my friend Yerkebulan, who is really good at them, with dumb questions. Leaving in reserve only a couple of days to study math, unfortunately, I failed it on an actual test. Although the test results are slightly below the recommended level at KAIST, the university I’m applying for, and I could show better performance, I am totally satisfied with them.

Here I found out that I have already written 413 words, which is more than twice as the IELTS Writing Task 2 requirement, which I used to struggle to come up with the idea and write some time ago.

Finally, it is almost 00:00 and I am totally tired,

so Good Bye, see you in the next posts!