cp-blog/difficulty/ #6
Description
What Makes a Problem Hard? | Yet Another Competitive Programming Blog
Just go to the comment section of any announcement blog for a contest, and you’ll likely see a comment like “A < C < B” or “E was much easier than D.” Or look at any leaderboard, and there’s always at least a few contestants who solve the problems out of order or skip some problem. Problem difficulty is a very subjective thing, and it’s always near impossible to create a set of problems such that A is strictly easier than B, which is strictly easier than C, and so on. Why is that the case, and what makes a problem difficult?