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Applications of Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer (D&Q for short) is a common and powerful problem solving paradigm in the world of algorithms. There are numerous well-known examples such as merge sort and fast...

What Makes a Problem Hard?

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...

Burnside's Lemma

Disclaimer: I typed this up a few months prior to making this website as personal notes for myself, so it’s possible that the article may be unclear in certain sections....

First Post

Welcome to my blog! I go by smax on Codeforces and most other competitive programming sites, and this is a fun personal project for me that I’ve always wanted to...