Google Code Jam Qualification 2021 Experience

Google Code Jam Qualification Round 2021 was an amazing learning experience.

The Contest started on 26-03-2021 in Evening at 6:30 p.m.
I started solving the Contest with an aim to score 30 points. Honestly, I had no intentions of solving extra problems or improving my rank.

But, surprisingly I ended up solving first 3 problems quite early, so I thought of reading further problems.

D problem - Median Sort was an interactive problem. I had never dealt with interactive problems before, though I have seen such problems, but I have always been skipping them. This time as well, I decided to skip it 😅

I directly moved on to E problem - Cheating Detection.
Now the problem statement itself seemed weird to me at first glance . I could just figure out one thing, that I had to find the person who has the maximum probability of being a cheater.
I just started solving the problem using the last paragraph of the problem statement. I framed a simple program, which as per my expectations, was sure to fail 😂

But, since wrong submissions have no penalty unless a right submission is made, I thought of giving it a try . And surprisingly it got partially accepted 🥳 without any penalties.

My happiness had no bounds. I remember it was around 3:30 a.m. late night and my international rankings changed to ~1000 on solving the problem.

Now, I was motivated enough to try the interactive problem. I read D problem statement carefully. I could figure out the logic of the code, but didn't know how to handle interactive problems.

But, I was sure about one thing, that if I know the logic of a problem, I needed to submit it anyhow.
Now, the Problem Statement had shared the link on Interactive Problems. I opened it, and Code Jam had shared a previously asked Interactive problem. I searched about it and and saw certain Python Codes to the problem.

In a few minutes I understood the difference. The only difference was "flush". Everytime I sent an output to the console, I was supposed to set the flush parameter to True.

Sometimes, what we think is very difficult, is not so difficult.

Surprisingly I ended up solving all 5 problems, some got fully accepted, some partially, leading to a total of 70 points out of 101.

The Contest was an amazing experience, got to learn many new things.

Looking forward to a great experience in the upcoming Round 1A.

Code hard, think harder, enjoy hardest.