Our team is starting to practice for the regionals, so this is just a documentary of our performances.

2018 East Central NA Regional Contest

Virtual Rank: 5

This contest was extremely tedious and annoying. Most problems are really easy, but extremely implementation heavy. It was so bad that we actually just gave up and went to get food after the fourth hour.
I really hope our regional wouldn’t look like this, or else I might cry haha.

2019 North Central NA Regional Contest

Solved: 11/11
Virtual Rank: 1

This is the contest that we just did today. Because it was a previous year of our region, so we did our best, and we AK’d the contest with twenty minutes left, which no other team did!

I personally solved pJ (solve rate 46%), pF (solve rate 16%), and pA (solve rate 4%).
pJ was a really simple brute force check problem, but I was not familiar with compiling the code without code runner and debugging without my debug template, so I actually spent quite some time getting used to it.
pJ is also a pretty easy one in my opinion, but because of some silly mistake, I got 3 WA on it, which I am really ashamed of.
pA is a interesting one, the original teammate (who solved the final problem that nobody else solved in the contest) had no idea, and I actually identified that it’s just a classic computational geometry problem: Minimum Enclosing Circle, so I one-shotted it with the powerful template I have.

Apart from a few problems, the contest isn’t hard at all. A teammate of mine even said that “Wow, this contest is so easy!”. (Although alot of problems still seem too out of reach for me).

We acutally solved our last three problems in a span of 40 minutes, one of which is the one nobody solved, so we were pretty excited about that.

I learned that I need to try one-shotting the problems and actually code after you are fully sure about the implementation and idea, or else you will become a burden in the team because you are wasting precious time by occupying the computer. I will contiunue to train this part and I hope we can be as successful (or even more) in the regionals!