Hello community,
I am pleased to invite you all to the ICO preparatory Series Contest #2.
The Aim of this contest is to introduce Competitive Programming at School student level as well as training for IOI aspirants. We hope to keep the problems sufficient to keep you engaged for four hours.
As an incentive, The top 3 Indian school students would be getting 250 laddus each.
The contest panel include
Problem Setters Abhishek Pandey and Taranpreet Singh
Problem Testers Abhishek Pandey and Taranpreet Singh
Editorials by This person
The round is unrated for both divisions, so, join the fun without the stress of rating and feel free to attack any problem.
Access this Contest here.
Contest Date: 26th August, 2018, 7:00PM IST (19:00 IST)
Contest Duration: 4 hours
Hoping to see you all on 26th. 
UPDATE: Owing to the overlapping timings of this round with Codeforces Round #506 (Div. 3), we have decided to conduct this round on sunday, 26th August. Inconvenience is regretted.
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looking forward to the contest.
good luck to all.
happy coding : )
Problem statements couldn’t have been worse. Totally ruined the problems, which are quite interesting though, with so much story 
The Stories were really creative! and the tasks too! Really enjoyed the 4hrs, Thnx a lot such a wonderful contest! 
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The editorials for all problems have been posted. Feel free to have a look and share your opinion/approach.
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Loved the stories !!..Taran good luck…You will need it when you meet Tarini.xD
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I see absolutely no correlation between problems having stories and the problem getting ruined apart from incompetent contestant.
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@vijju123 that’s right, and in my opinion, the problem becomes more interesting to read if it has a story, especially a funny one, like the ones we had in this contest.
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I can agree to the fact that my statements were longer than usual. Quite long, but its not the first time. At times longer statements had been at cookoff or LTIME. Plus, it was unrated contest, for fun, and had a generous time of 4 hours for easy problems. I feel that the stories werent the usual dull ones either, and thought that it’d add to the fun contestants have while solving them
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Might be better to dial down on the stories or add a formal description of the problem in the end next time. It becomes an issue when you have to read a story longer than your english essays to comprehend the problem statement and try to find the small parts that actually matters to the problem, which were less than 10% of what was written, because they are spread out in bits and pieces across the statement. It becomes pretty frustating to be honest. This was especially true for TIMPLEM and TARITAR, the rest 2 were fine in my opinion. I might be incompetent, can’t really comment on that.
If you’d have some deductions, you;d see the statements merely seemed long because of multiple new lines to keep it clean. TIMPLEM, for example, was hardly 300 words. If 300 words is much more and longer than your essays then its your english, sorry. The usual rule is statements must not exceed 500 words, which was kept for all the statements.
500 meaningful words -> okay. 50 meaningful words + ~250 words story -> not okay. I don’t want to argue more so I would just suggest to add a formal description next time to make the problem statement better for all! PS. 250 word limit in CBSE, can’t help it 
It depends from perception to perception. For me, even longer statements arent a problem as long as a single read suffices to understand it. Formal statement v/s Story in statement is a open debate since eons and eons alike, I agree to not taking it further. To each his view.
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Glad you liked
Story creativity goes to our lonely vijju
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Haha xD
I talked to her for our lonely vijju, and guess What, she agreed. Today is their first date.
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Yes, we hoped to add element of fun since it was an unrated contest, with 4 hours for 4 problems.
To each his view
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Lololololol. Arguments aside, thats a decent comeback. Tarini is tailormade for you so dont play hard to get @taran_1407 
HI ,could you please release a date sheet of the upcoming ico preparatory contests intended to be held like last year !