I'm currently in class 12th and I really need to learn and win this. Somebody please guide me what to do, how to prepare and which programming to learn.

I'm very serious about this and am aiming to do this with most of my time and dedication

Also do tell if it's even possible for a class 12th high school student or not

Is there anyone who is preparing for IOI and can sync with me? I want a partner to study with. Believe me you are going to enjoy the prep if you prepare with someone. So is anyone ready?

Would love to hear the experiences of people who went to IOI.

Recently I came across this problem from IARCS Problem Archive , and after some research , the answer seems to be tarjan's algorithm to find the points which when deleted , breaks the graph in two or more smaller graphs .

Here is this article "Articulation Points (or Cut Vertices) in a Graph " on that algorithm from geeks for geeks , but what is the use of that time variable and the arrays disc and low , why do we need to maintain them?

INOI is coming up soon, and seeing that only C++98 was provided in ZCO, I won't be surprised (but would be upset) that they provide the same in INOI.

Normally I represent undirected graphs as an unordered_map of vectors, like this:

unordered_map <int, vector <int>> graph;

For directed graphs, I may use an unordered_map of unordered_maps to store the weights.

However, what is the best way to do so in C++98, especially for sparse graphs. Do I have to resort to something like: int graph[n][n] which would consume quite a lot of space, as it is basically just an adjacency matrix.

which language is better and easy to learn ?