Thank you very much for all your insights. Visited some of the links being recommended and whoa, competitive programming is a whole new world (and a very different one at that). I consider myself not a newbie to programming but I just didn't develop and/or improve any skills that would be useful in this area. Perhaps the equivalent of slacking of in the computer science sense. Now would be a good time to start though and I will try to see what I can improve between now and Round 1. To sum up what I understood from the two posts: -Practice a lot. Solve a lot. Experience a lot of types of problems. -Train in coding error-free algorithms in the shortest possible time <- I admit I really didn't think much of this aspect until it was mentioned. -Study algorithms.
I do have a question about the 'solving' part. What is your school-of-thought regarding looking at someone else's solution if you really really cannot solve a problem? 1. No! Must not use a walkthrough. Try and try until ... 2. Acceptable. Perhaps looking at someone else's solution can enlighten you more? (Then maybe the question will be the timing when to start looking at the solution of others?) 3. Others. please specify: _____________________ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/74a75926-f6aa-4ce1-910e-1bd055062d81%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
