Introduction to Competitive

Programming*

Acknowledgements: ppt by William W.Y. Hsu

entitled “Introduction to Competitive Programming”
 Why CP

• Makes you a better programmer and thinker in many

situations
• Intangible skill that will set you apart in the workforce
• Start preparing for ACM-ICPC, and more
• It's fun :)

2
 Ultimate goal

• Please note that being well-versed in competitive

programming is not the end goal, but only a means to an end.
• The true end goal is to produce all-rounder computer
scientists/ programmers who are much readier to produce
better software and to face harder CS research problems in
the future.

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 Competitive Programming

• Given well-known computer science problems, solve

them as fast as possible.
– Find a solution that reduces down to a well-known
problems, not research problems.
– Pass all the judge data correctly.
– Solution should run fast enough.

4
 How?

• Study common types of problems.

• Show common applications of algorithms and data structures
you already know from:
– the algorithms course
– the data structures course
• Introduce other common algorithms and data structures.
• Go over some commonly used theory.
• Practice problem solving.
• Practice programming.
• More practice.

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 Some Good Books

• Steven Halim, Competitive Programming, 3rd Edition, ASIN:

B00FG8MNN8.
• S. S. Skiena, M. A. Revilla, Programming Challenges: The
Programming Contest Training Manual, Springer, 2003 ed.
• S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual, 2nd ed., Springer.
(ISBN-10: 1848000693)
• R. Graham, D. Knuth, O. Patashnik, Concrete Mathematics: A
Foundation for Computer Science.

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 The problems

• Typical programming contest problems usually consists of:

– Problem description
– Input description
– Output description
– Example input/output
– A time limit in seconds
– A memory limit in megabytes
• You are asked to write a program that solves the problem for
all valid inputs.
– partial solved problem receive partial score.
• The program must not exceed time or memory limits!

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 Example problem*

Problem description
Write a program that multiplies pairs of integers.

Input description
Input starts with one line containing an integer , where ,
denoting the number of test cases. Then lines follow, each
containing a test case. Each test case consists of two integers ,
where , separated by a single space.

Output description
For each test case, output one line containing the value of

*PPT: Introduction to Competitive Programming by Instructor: William W.Y. Hsu 8

 Example problem

Sample input Sample output

4 12
34 0
13 0 8
18 10000
100 100

1/27/2025 *PPT: Introduction to Competitive Programming by Instructor: William W.Y. Hsu 9

 Correctness?

• The solutions are incorrect!

• If , the output is 0.
– Correct solution is .
• 32-bit integer is too small, overflow will occur.
– Can switch to 64-bit integer mode. (Architecture dependent)
• Remedy:
– long long int

1/27/2025 *PPT: Introduction to Competitive Programming by Instructor: William W.Y. Hsu 10

 Judge verdicts (ACM-ICPC)

• Feedback about solutions is limited

• You will (usually) receive one of:
– Accepted
– Wrong Answer
– Compile Error
– Run Time Error
– Time Limit Exceeded
– Memory Limit Exceeded

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 Tips

• There are a couple of tips and guidelines you can keep in mind
towards becoming a more effective programmer and better
problem solver.

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 Tip 0: Faster typing*

• Become a faster/better typist.

• Know your IDE (Different ACM- ICPC competition/sites might
have different IDE)
• Don’t let your fingers be the limiting factor of solving
problems quickly.
• Good problem solvers have simple solutions; they don’t have
to type as much, but it’s still important to type in quickly

• TypeRacer is a fun and effective way to practice:

http://play.typeracer.com/

*PPT: Introduction to Competitive Programming by Instructor: William W.Y. Hsu 13

 Tips: Quickly classify problems

• Practice quickly identifying problem types: Array/ stack/

Greedy/ D&C/ DP/ Graph/ Math
• Do the quick algo analysis based on given constraints and
decide which algo is needed: O(n2) or O(n log n) or O (n) or
O (log n) etc
• Aim to think of brute force solution atleast in the initial days,
if other solution is not coming to your mind.

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 Tips: Master programming languages

• You should know your programming language like the back of

your hand.
• After thinking of a solution, convey the solution in code as
quickly as possible.
• Use libraries, shortcuts, and write simple code.
• This includes your programming language’s library:
– C++’s Standard Template Library (STL)
– The Java Class Library
• If it’s already implemented in the standard library, you usually
don’t need to implement it yourself!

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 Tips: Master programming languages

• Java:
– Scanner, BigInteger, String static functions,
– Collections, different data types
– Integer.parseInt()
– String.substring()
– etc
• C++
– sort(), vector<T>, STL
• C
– qsort(), malloc(), …

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 Tips: Test your solution

• You want to make sure your solution is correct and

• runs within the time limit.
• Or you already know it’s wrong, but don’t know why…
– Try to break your solution by finding a counterexample.
– (an input for which your solution gives incorrect output, or takes too
long to compute an answer)
• Try boundary cases, large inputs, .special & exceptional
inputs..
• Submit correctly!
– Competitions only care about correct code.
– Wrong submissions may have penalty
– The best teams write test cases before submitting their solutions!

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 Most Important Tip

• Problem solving and programming skills come with practice.

• So Practice,
• more practice,
• and more practice

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 C++: STL
• Standard Template Library
• You have already studied templates., STL is extension to
that
• Collections of useful classes for common data structures
• Ability to store objects of any type (template)
• Containers form the basis for treatment of data
structures
• Container –class that stores a collection of data
• STL consists of 10 container classes:
– Sequence containers
– Adapter containers
– Associative containers
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 C++: STL
• The standard template library (STL) contains
– Containers
– Algorithms
– Iterators
• A container is a way that stored data is organized in
memory, for example an array of elements.
• Algorithms in the STL are procedures that are applied to
containers to process their data, for example search for
an element in an array, or sort an array.
• Iterators are a generalization of the concept of pointers,
they point to elements in a container, for example you
can increment an iterator to point to the next element in
an array 20
 C++: STL
• https://www.topcoder.com/community/data-
science/data-science-tutorials/power-up-c-with-the-
standard-template-library-part-1/
• https://www.topcoder.com/community/data-
science/data-science-tutorials/power-up-c-with-the-
standard-template-library-part-2/
• Good details are given in IIITD’s ppt on STL
• Let us have a look
• I started using STL by copy-paste of simple codes like
vectors, map/hash (let us have a look in DevCpp, code-
generation settings changed to have language standard:
ISO C++ 11)

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#include <bits/stdc++.h>
/*either include bits/stdc++.h or include indiv header files like
#include<iostream>
#include<vector> */
using namespace std;
int main()
{ // Initializing vector with values
vector<int> vect1{1, 2, 3, 4};
vector<int> vect2; // Declaring new vector
// copy elements of old vector into new vector by Iterative method
for (int i=0; i<vect1.size(); i++)
vect2.push_back(vect1[i]);
cout << "Old vector elements are : ";
for (int i=0; i<vect1.size(); i++)
cout << vect1[i] << " ";
}
 Practice Using STL
• Using stack STL, Find whether a given string is palindrome
or not
• Using vector, find average of all numbers, T times, where
each time user tells some new elements or deletes some
old elements. Use resize, shrink_to_fit , reserve aetc.
• Use hash_table and map of STL and solve any simple
problem

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int T,n,val1; vector<int> vect1;
ifstream infile ("in1.txt"); ofstream outfile("out1.txt");
if(!infile){cout<< "input file missing\n"; return -1;}
infile >> T;
while (T--)
{ infile >>n;
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
{ infile >> val1;
vect1.push_back(val1); }
vector<int> vect2;
for (int i=vect1.size() -1; i>=0; i--)
vect2.push_back(vect1[i]);
outfile << "Vector 2: Old vector elements in reverse order are ";
for (int i=0; i<vect1.size(); i++)
outfile << vect2[i] << " ";
outfile << endl;
vect2.clear();//is of no use as recreated everytime, but vect1 gets appended
(not over-written with new inputs in each iterations
//vect1.clear(); //clear vect1 for no append to previous inputs