Dear Mr. Manzoor,
I deeply enjoy the ideas behind most of the problems you post. From this point of view, you are a great problemsetter (one of my favourite ones
). Keep up the good work!
However, there is also the other side of your problems - the problem statement. Being a problemsetter myself I understand, how hard it is to write a clear and bug-free problem statement. Not being a native english speaker, I know the amount of work required to write a clear problem statement in English. But I also know that bad English may cause many solvers to misunderstand the problem or not to understand anything at all. And troubles mentioned in previous posts seem to be often connected with your problem statements,
not with the ideas. (As a wild guess, I think it is partially because there are so many of them...)
A few examples:
Recently I solved "10655 Contemplation - Algebra". I enjoyed the problem very much. However, I supposed incorrectly, that a and b have to be integers (as it is common practice if nothing else is said, especially in case of very brief problem statements). I had to check the forum to find out my mistake. Still, the problem was nice and not too easy after I noted the fact. E.g. I still had to consider complex a,b.
Point: Sometimes it
isn't a bad idea to be
a little more specific in the problem statement. In this case, a sentence like "Note that a and b don't have to be integers" would make the problem more clear, while not much easier to solve. Still, there is one another way to do this: If you want to omit such details and make them a catch in the problem, the best way to do this is to state the
rest of the problem very, very formally. In that way the contestant knows the given limits
precisely and he shouldn't assume anything more. With vague problem statements like in 10655 this is a problem.
I did also solve "10656 Maximum Sum II" and the experience was horrible. This was clearly supposed to be the easy task in the batch. Wasn't. Reason: Bad and ugly problem statement. Confusing and unclear. The current version is already better than the original ("and I mean sequence" and bits like that), but it still isn't clear ("must have a single number in it", the word "summation", more sequences of minimum length?).
Please try to make the problem statements as clear as possible. It won't make the problems any easier (or, in some cases, much easier), but it will make them more fun to solve and less frustrating. Also, try to use as simple English phrases as possible and include a well-described example if not sure whether the problem statement is sufficiently clear.
Hope you will read this
good luck
. The problem is really nice. And do you really want to solve only problems where you needn't use your brains a bit? So, to my mind Mr. Manzoor was right not to say anything about values of a and b.