Good news! A bronze medal! Top 25%.
It was a busy weekend, Julia spent over 10 hours a day on algorithm problem solving, scored 67.81, ranked 737/ 5269 at 12:27am, 9/26/2016, still 7 hours left. Usually China is day time next 7 hours, the rank will go down more.
The experience was so different from her practice on Leetcode algorithm. She learned some new skills through long hours struggling. Most of things are about how to scale large data, timeout issue, out-of-memory. She found out the joy of programming.
Some facts to set high standards, try to get into top 12% of contest, despite lack of preparation:
It is a 48 hours contest. Saturday and Sunday two days.
1. She only did one mile driving on last Sunday to spend 30 minutes to do grocery shopping, and two days to stay at home, worked on the algorithms.
2. On Saturday, spent 8+ hours to work on an algorithm using interval (Leetcode 56: Intervals), worked on timeout, design issues, space issues - out-of-memory. Score 20 out of 20 after 8 hours work.
3. On Sunday, spent 8+ hours to score 20 out of 40 - DP problem.
Still timeout, DP solution is not fast enough.
Spent first 2 hours to work on dynamic programming test cases, figured out the recurrence formula.
Actionable items:
1. Spend some time to read those blogs about contests, figure out what to learn from. (plan to read 2 - 3 hours)
http://blog.csdn.net/philipsweng
How other people review their contest? (Ranking: 14/5000, score 345/ 400)
http://blog.csdn.net/philipsweng/article/details/51730709
2. read blog 2+ hours, find ideas to work on
https://www.quora.com/profile/Bohdan-Pryshchenko
HackerRank profile:
https://www.hackerrank.com/I_love_Tanya
3. another one:
https://www.quora.com/profile/Joshua-Pan-1
https://goo.gl/K3iYRY
4. Read some algorithms: (instead of Googling, use the website for reference - catch up - reading - plan to spend first 3 hours on this)
https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/algorithms/dynamic-programming/bit-masking/tutorial/
Another favorite of mine is — #2 HackerEarth (includes tutorials and separated into categories/sorted easiest to hardest): Algorithms Tutorials & Practice Problems
- A note about this: I really enjoyed HackEarth’s previous practice section (it was a lot better formatted). If anyone can get this to HackerEarth executives, that would be a great piece of advice for them.
Will document more later.
5. 9/28/2015
Some analysis - Julia only can score 15% (70/ 400) compared to best talent people in the world, if she works damn hard. Time wise, she could not solve difficult level algorithm yet, no data. 15% wise, She only score 70/400 in code sprint, but best one scores 400 in less than 10 hours.
But through the contest, she knows that she can close the gap and measure the progress in every month, every contest. Set up 5 stages - 15%, 25%, 30%, 40%, 50%, and relax and enjoy problem solving day by day.
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