Exercises

There are massive sets of programming competition problems out there, like the excellent Methods to Solve page by Steven Halim. Below, I’ve collected a few problems that I recommend if you’d like practice with the book material. My advice is to read the relevant chapter and work through the problems in the book, then practice with some of the below problems to solidify your understanding.

I’ve chosen problems from some judges that we don’t use in the book, so you might need to make some new judge accounts if you haven’t used those judges yet.

I’m always looking for more problems to help people practice and learn. If you have a favourite problem, please let me know! Thank you in advance.

Have fun!

Chapter 1 (Hash Tables)

• CD
• shiritori
• 1-SAT

Chapter 2 (Trees and Recursion)

• Balanced Teams
• Secret Code
• Breed Assignment
• Geppetto

Chapter 3 (Memoization and Dynamic Programming)

• Computer Purchase Return
• Sasha Vilkin
• Text Segmentation
• Muzicari
• Bajka
• Bridge Crossing (read the Dynamic Programming section in Appendix B about how to do problems like this :) )

Chapter 4 (Advanced Memoization and Dynamic Programming)

• Pi-Day
• Secret of Chocolate Poles
• The Debut Album
• Choose your Own Arithmetic
• Assignment of the Year
• Putnik
• Jednakost

Chapter 5 (Graphs and Breadth-First Search)

• Choose your Own Path
• RoboThieves
• Ivan’s Car
• Wizard and Maze
• Birmingham
• Cookie Galore
• Switch the Lamp On

Chapter 6 (Shortest Paths in Weighted Graphs)

• Come Back Quickly
• Train (interesting twist on Dijkstra!)
• Convex Hull
• Speed Limits

Chapter 7 (Binary Search)

• ProblemSets
• Convention
• Koala Balloons
• Odasiljaci
• Aerodrom
• Self Study
• Haircut

Chapter 8 (Heaps and Segment Trees)

• Exec Team Applications
• World of World of Warcraft
• Even Colouring
• Snjeguljica
• Peanut Planning

Chapter 9 (Union-Find)

• Friends
• Liars and Truth Tellers

Also still looking for more. (If you have a great one, please let me know!)

Chapter 10 (Randomization)

• Code Review