I’m working on a project this year to build a competitive programming FAQ. This is one in a series of articles describing the research, writing, and tool creation process. To read the whole series, see my CPFAQ category page.

Now that I have a database of competitive programming questions, I thought it would be interesting to look for patterns in the way that questions are asked. This will be useful in writing canonical question titles, which will result in the set of questions included in the FAQ.

I briefly considered loading the list of questions into a text mining program, and even tried out a free online tool. But ultimately I decided that was overkill, so I wrote a simple program to find the words that are most frequently used to start the questions in my list.

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I’m working on a project this year to build a competitive programming FAQ. This is one in a series of articles describing the research, writing, and tool creation process. To read the whole series, see my CPFAQ category page.

Data in a relational database is often not arranged in a way that makes sense to the end user. Instead, it’s optimized to reduce duplication and improve query performance. So when it’s retrieved from the database, it needs to be converted into a more optimal format through a combination of SQL queries and application logic. As an example, I’ll use data from my question database.

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