Math and Algorithm Magic

I have been away from Competitive Programming for a long time (about 2 years). No, not because I lost interest in it. I was simply too busy with university coursework. This break was also beneficial in another way - I realized that there are so many things that are much more valuable and important in Computer Science than Competitive Programming. Competitive Programming, while fun as a hobby, does not have much practical use in most real-world applications. My reasons for saying this are as follows: Many real-world problems are NP-hard (i.e. do not have efficient solutions) and it is more practical to solve such problems by approximation rather than computing an exact solution. However, in Programming Competitions, most of the time, we are given problems that have known efficient solutions and the results simply depend on who can discover and implement the solution the fastest. In the real-world, we need the patience and resilience to try different approaches to problems for whi