When I came up with 12 Reasons to Study Competitive Programming, I picked the following for reason #3: Studying competitive programming gives you a way to practice solving hard problems.
(As I pointed out in the article, this is also a reason that some people give for not studying competitive programming. They claim that most software developers work only on trivial problems. So they don’t see any reason to practice solving hard problems. That has always seemed to me like a backwards argument).
What does it mean for a problem to be hard? To answer that, I’ll borrow part of the definition of deep work: a problem is hard if it requires specific training and experience to solve. While some ad-hoc competitive programming problems can be solved by any programmer willing to spend an hour or so thinking and coding, modern contests contain problems that only programmers who have spent considerable effort practicing can solve in a reasonable amount of time.
That’s the type of hard problem that I’m talking about. To be hard, a programming problem doesn’t have to involve an unsolved research question. But it does need to provide a challenge to people who spend a lot of time solving puzzles.
What makes competitive programming hard? Here are some factors.
