Preparing for IOI Training Camp

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International Informatics Olympiad Training Camp


Preparing for the IOI Training Camp was not any different for me as the usual practice. Though saying that would be a bit inadequate as I practiced very little competitive programming in the months from November to March, mainly due to school exams. Still, I would like to give a few pointers that might help.

Firstly, try solving all the problems from the IARCS problem archive. Although this should be a pre-requisite for preparing for INOI, it is not necessary. However, solving all the problems of the problem archive should help you. For my own part, I rarely submitted actual solutions to get AC, mainly due to lack of time, (and a little bit of laziness :), ehh not really ) but I tried finding the solutions for all the problems in pen and paper.

Next, the main thing to know is that solving problems o CF and Codechef won't help much in the Team Selection Test. They usually are trivial, or have very little in common with the types of problems that comes in the OI style contests. For that, the only good online judge that I know of is the WCIPEG judge. My personal favourite is Ahmed-Aly online judge : the categorized problems there really help a lot. Apart from that USACO is also nice.

Problem is, atleast from the perspective of writing this blog, my practising for the camp was extremely irregular at home. There was no fixed routine, and I almost never participated in too many contests. However, this I tried to make up in my school. Nonetheless, the number of problems that I solved does not seem to be much in comparison to what others solve. I mainly focused on data structure based questions... DP was always a bit problematic for me. Another thing was that I did not try to learn too many new data structures. Practising old ones was, according to me, more important as I knew most of the important ones and learning their varied applications seemed more important than learning new but obscure data structures.



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