What is Competitive Programming?

Aug 15, 2023

What is Competitive Programming?

In this video, I describe what Competitive Programming is all about, including benefits like jobs from top companies!

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Content

23.44 -> Come on come on

27.68 -> Yes!!!

29.15 -> You might have seen my video of winning Google Kickstart Round A and you might have no idea what's going on.

35.6 -> If you haven't seen it, be sure to check it out.

37.804 -> The video will probably appear somewhere on the screen and I'll also provide a link in the description.

43.79 -> Competitive programming, or CP for short, is a mind sport where participants need to write programs to solve well-defined problems.

52.58 -> Those problems are often related to algorithms, data structures, math, and logic.

57.41 -> The programs of the contestants are judged by many different factors including how much time the programs take

64.489 -> and how much memory the programs use.

67.102 -> There are many benefits to doing CP which I'll describe later.

70.98 -> If you don't completely understand what I just said

74.539 -> then that's okay. I'll show you a really simple example of a problem right now.

81.05 -> Here we have a problem where we are asked to compute the sum of two integers.

87.4 -> So the input that we're given is two integers and a is the first integer and b is the second integer.

95.96 -> We're supposed to return the sum of the two integers and this should be pretty simple

101.84 -> for anyone who has a bit of programming experience.

105.95 -> So if we go to the code here,

109.25 -> we just need to type

111.08 -> return a plus b and that'll solve the problem.

115.43 -> To check if our program is correct, we'll submit this program and

121.22 -> it will be judged against a few test cases to see if the program is correct.

129.86 -> Our program got accepted and

133.01 -> Yeah, so that's great.

134.29 -> This is a very simple example. The actual problems you see in CP will be much harder than this.

141.86 -> Basically for each problem you need to write a program that takes in some input

148.97 -> and processes the input and outputs the answer.

152.15 -> By the way, if you want to try this out yourself, this site is called HackerRank and

158.39 -> it's one of the well-known sites for CP.

161.95 -> Also, I used C++ in this example, but you can use any language to solve CP problems, like Java or Python.

171.21 -> Now, in contests, you basically have a bunch of these problems that you need to solve.

175.5 -> The contestants are generally ranked by the number of problems that they solve, the time that they take to solve those problems,

181.95 -> and the number of incorrect attempts that they make.

185.61 -> I'll explain the scoring for this Codeforces contest briefly.

189.8 -> In this contest, there are six problems from A to F and each problem has a maximum score shown at the top.

196.71 -> So problem A has a maximum score of 500 and problem E has a maximum score of 2500.

205.35 -> After each minute of the contest, the scores of the problems decrease by a small fraction.

212.25 -> As you can see here, I solved problem A within the first minute of the contest,

217.8 -> so the score did not decrease at all and I got the full 500 points for this problem.

223.98 -> I solved problem F much later in the contest

226.61 -> so my score for problem F is much lower than the maximum score for problem F.

232.98 -> Lastly your total score is just the sum of your scores for the individual problems and

239.52 -> contestants are ranked according to the scores.

243.33 -> So now I will go over the benefits of doing CP.

247.23 -> First of all, doing CP helps you prepare for coding interviews for major companies like FAANG, which stands for Facebook, Amazon,

255.3 -> Apple, Netflix, and Google.

257.82 -> Questions that are asked in coding interviews are basically just easy-to-medium-leveled CP problems and that's why you see many of the top

265.77 -> competitive programmers ending up with a job at these companies.

269.89 -> The second benefit, which only applies to secondary school students, is Olympiads.

275.12 -> Informatics Olympiads are basically just CP contests for high school students.

280.14 -> Each country has a national contest and a training camp,

283.4 -> for example, the USA has the USA computing Olympiad.

287.84 -> Each country ultimately selects four students to represent their country in the International Olympiad in informatics.

295.23 -> Obtaining a medal in the International Olympiad in informatics is a huge boost for applying to certain prestigious universities.

304.21 -> Some countries even have rules which will guarantee your admission to those universities.

309.6 -> If you represent Taiwan and obtain a medal, for example, you're guaranteed admission to National Taiwan University,

316.77 -> which is basically the best university in Taiwan.

320.79 -> Lastly, CP is fun. I consider CP to be no different than any other esport

326.39 -> so that's why you may have noticed I set the category of my channel to games.

330.44 -> I just love the feeling of satisfaction

333.48 -> when I paste together the final part of a problem, code and submit my program, and see the green "Accepted" status on my program

341.37 -> after hours of hard work.

343.35 -> During contests, I love the rush of adrenaline as I race time to innovate solutions for the problems presented before me.

351.63 -> For me, the tiny green status

354.25 -> ignites exhilaration that an athlete and their fans would experience after a goal.

359.48 -> If you are interested in competitive programming then be sure to subscribe as I'll be posting more information about how you can start competitive programming.

369.54 -> I also have a Discord server and the link is in the description below

374.09 -> I will be posting solutions to various contests on the server and you can also discuss CP with other members on the server.

382.95 -> That's basically it. Thanks for watching!

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueNT-w7Oluw