This week in competitive programming

There were seveal contests during the week, but in the end I only get to cover one in the weekly summary: TopCoder SRM 610 took place on Tueday (problems, results, top 5 on the left). It featured three somewhat standard problems - this didn't stop me from not solving one of them, of course. I think the most instructive problem was the medium: you are given several tasks, i-th task consuming a_i energy when started and returning b_i energy when completed (but energy is not allowed to become negative while performing a task), b_i < a_i. What is the maximum number of tasks you can perform given your starting energy?

This type of problem is often tricky to get right, but in many cases can be solved using a disciplined approach that I will try to describe in a future post.

There were also two Codeforces rounds during the week, and an Open Cup round on Sunday. Codeforces has unfortunately lost last month's data afterwards due to a hardware failure, so there's no way to look at the problems and results now. Open Cup results, on the other hand, are still not finalized because of precision issues in one of the problems, so I will have to cover them in the next week's summary - stay tuned!