Camp when?
Score: 494, the distribution was 333 / 56 / 105
The contest went pretty well, perhaps even better than the January contest. I quickly (in the first 30 minutes) got the main observation for problem 1. Although I proceeded to spend 1 hour on implementation, I just felt confident that I could pull a >400 score again with the 2.5 hours remaining.
So I was pretty calm and relaxed and got 494 with 1 hour remaining. Maybe some parts of me thought this was good enough, while some other parts of me still thought I should try to full solve another problem, since this would probably be enough to make it to the leaderboard.
I just thought p2 was probably actually easy and it had a lot of subtasks that could hopefully get me to a >500 score so I spent the remaining hour doing p2 and got 0 points. But I guess this was fine since I still don’t think I would’ve gotten p3 anyway.
I feel the style of platinum contests, or perhaps even gold, have changed a lot. At least noticably there hasn’t been as much graph problems (0 in plat, not sure how many in gold), and the problems are more ad-hoc in general. Perhaps this benefits me since I’m probably an ad-hoc main, but this would probably mean that even if I somehow make USACO camp, I would still have to rely on this kind of different style to perform well.
Hopefully I don’t throw USACO Open along with my camp chances 🙏 People say an average of >300 should make but I don’t know how much more USACO open is weighted so it’s a little scary. Why isn’t the cutoffs for camp disclosed 😭.
I also hope USACO could let us know our rank within people in the United States who took the contest (maybe certified). Last time I got 421, which was apparently a very common score, and it was rank 49. I have no idea how this converts to the rank in the United States (or perhaps if we limit it to certified people).
Reposting manifold market
https://manifold.markets/C0DET1GER/will-i-make-usaco-camp-in-2025?play=true
My manifold net worth tripled in February which was … nice?