USACO happened today.
A rough recount of what happened.
first like 20 minutes I look at A. I see the graph, then think of the matching solve (I think it’s right? whatever.) I realize it’s general matching and blossom and well I don’t know blossom. I didn’t think they would set blossom. So I put it off as probably wrong approach.
next like 20 minutes on B. I find the cyclic shift pattern, and realize the 45 degree rotation helps. But didn’t see anything else.
C. I find the dp solve to subtask 1 easily, and then don’t see anything immediately.
That was the first hour.
Subsequent hours I was mostly trying to solve stuff, around 50% B 20% A 30% C? maybe more like 70% B 20% A 10% C? what?
I don’t really remember. I definitely spent a lot of time on B though.
With little progress.
Sometime in the middle I give up on B, realizing that if I did figure it out it’d be hella casework and I didn’t want to do allat.
Around 1:30 from end I start implementing C, subtask 1 (and I also mindsolve subtask 2). Subtask 1 AC’s easily, can’t get subtask 2 to work for my life. IDk too much formula bashing for me.
Around 0:30 I realize I’m almost out of time and start partial farming. I get the trivial A partials, then I try to go back to C subtask.
Also btw judge server was slow asf and I sillied the whitespace on A so I submitted at like 5 minutes from end and it didn’t judge until post-contest. Those 5 minutes were kinda stressful ngl.
Total score 150. distro 4/0/5.
Not great, ngl. But also I don’t really see anywhere that I could’ve done better. Failed knowledge check on A (presumably), B is pretty hard. I think maybe I could get C, if I tried a bit harder on it. Or… at least subtask 2 on C.
well, idk what to say. hopefully this isn’t that bad…
upd: Oh and apparently p1 wasn’t intended to be blossom. I was right in looking for more observations. But I just didn’t find any……
upd 2: apparently you can just greedy? I did think of that but didn’t believe in it…
