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Competitive Programming and Contests

Teacher: Rossano Venturini
CFU: 6
Period: First semester
Language: English
Classroom: here. Code is d77kira
Lectures schedule: Monday 9-11 Room C1 and Thursday 9-11 Room C1 -- (Google Meet, link on our classroom)
Question time: After lectures or by appointment

Goals and opportunities

The goal of the course is to improve programming and problem-solving skills of the students by facing them with difficult problems and by presenting the techniques that help their reasoning in the implementation of correct and efficient solutions. The importance of these skills has been recognized by the most important software companies worldwide, which evaluate candidates in their job interviews mostly by the ability in addressing such difficult problems (e.g., see here).

A natural goal is to involve the students in the intellectual pleasure of programming and problem solving, also preparing them for the most important international online contests, such as Topcoder, Codeforces, HackerRank, CodeChef, Facebook Hacker Cup, Google Code Jam and so on, for internships in most important companies and their interviews. A desirable side-effect of the course could be to organize and prepare teams of students for online contests.

The course will provide the opportunity of

facing with challenging algorithmic problems;
improving problem solving and programming skills;
getting in touch with some big companies for internships, scholarships, or thesis proposals.

Exam

See these slides. Mandatory exercises for homeworks are in bold.

Extra points for

active participation
serious participation to online contests, e.g., CodeForces, TopCoder, Hacker Rank, Google Code Jam, ...
successful interview with a big company

Implementing solutions for the problems of each lecture is strongly recommended to improve your problem solving skill and to practice with Rust.

I recommend you to create a github repository to collect all your solutions and their descriptions. The repository can be either private or public. In both cases I should be able to access it. Please send me a link to your repository and keep the repository updated. I should be able to monitor your progresses.

Upcoming Exams

| Type | Date | Room | | ------------- | ------------- | ------------- | | Written/Lab | 03/02/2022 9:00 | Google Meet |

Old Exams

| Type | Date | Text | | ------------- | ------------- | ------------- | | Written/Lab | 23/01/2018 9:30 | Text, TestSet, and Solution | | Written/Lab | 14/02/2018 9:30 | Text, TestSet, and Quadratic solution| | Written/Lab | 12/06/2018 14:00 | Text, TestSet, and Solution | | Written/Lab | 06/07/2018 9:30 | Text and TestSet | | Written/Lab | 14/01/2019 14:00 | Text and TestSet|

How to solve a problem

Read carefully the description of the problem.
Make sure you understand the problem by checking the examples.
Design a first trivial solution.
Think about a more efficient solution. The use of some running examples usually helps a lot in finding a better solution. If your are not able to find such solution, try to find some hints by discussing with other students, by asking questions on the group, by looking at the solution in our Web page, or by searching on internet. This is perfectly fine for the first problems and for most difficult ones. In any case, make sure you really understand the solution and the properties it is exploiting!
Write a brief description of your solution in English. Provide an analysis of its time and space complexity.
Implement your own solution.
Submit your implementation to the problem's site. Fix it until it passes all the tests.
Always compare your solution and your implementation with existing ones.

Background <a name="Background"></a>

If you wish to refresh your mind on basic Algorithms and Data Structures, I suggest you to look at the well-known book Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein.

I strongly suggest you to watch the following video lectures as soon as possible.

References

Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition, Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein, The MIT Press, 2009 (Amazon) [CCLR]
Algorithms, 4th Edition, Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2011 (Amazon) [RS]
Algorithms, Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou, Umesh Vazirani, McGraw-Hill, 2006. (Amazon) [DPZ]
Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual, Steven S. Skiena, Miguel A. Revilla, Springer, 2003 (Amazon) [SR]
Competitive Programming 4: The New Lower Bound of Programming Contests, Steven Halim, Felix Halim, (here) [HH]
Guide to Competitive Programming: Learning and Improving Algorithms Through Contests. Second Edition, Antti Laaksonen, Springer, 2020 (here) [L]

Rust

C++

The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition, Bjarne Stroustrup, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2013 (Amazon)
A Tour of C++, 2nd Edition, Bjarne Stroustrup, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2018 (Amazon)
The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference, 2nd Edition, Nicolai M. Josuttis, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2012 (Amazon)

Useful links

Erik D Demaine, Srini Devadas, Nancy Ann Lynch, "MIT Design and Analysis of Algorithms", MIT Algorithm course which includes video lectures
Tim Roughgarden, "Algorithm specialization", Coursera
Visualgo: visualising data structures and algorithms through animation
Geeks for Geeks: Company interviews preparation
Interviews common coding questions
How to: Work at Google — Example Coding/Engineering Interview Video
Google's Code Jam
Topcoder
Codeforces
LeetCode
HackerRank
Geeks for Geeks
LeetCode
CodeChef - Data Structures and Algorithms links
Geeks for Geeks: Top 10 Algorithms and Data Structures for Competitive Programming
List of resources for competitive programming

Lectures

| Date | Lecture | References | Problems | | ------------- | ------------- | ------------- | -------

CompetitiveProgramming

Install / Use

README