You seemed to already know the answer XD Anyway, yeah, the problems I set will be mostly about maths. I cannot think "algorithmically" much myself :P

Haha sorry XD

You keep participating in this contest series and you will definitely get something(If you solve one at least). For the next contest, the whole problemset will be prepared by me :)

Oh, I am sorry, it was Shashwat Chandra :P

And moreover, here goes the editorial alongwith my solution :)

https://discuss.codechef.com/questions/114401/ista2001-editorial

Thank you so much for your feedback. :) I set the problem with the Ant so that people who don't know a lot of topics can solve it, Udit's problem was a DP problem, if you know DP it's quite easy I would say. My problem was googlable.

I can say that your second formula is correct but you also need to consider other cases. You did l+b but kept h outside, you should also try h+l and keep b outside and do h+b and keep l outside and then take the min. I hope this helped. :)

Btw you should read up and trees and graphs, these are VERY popular topics after DP.

Also heyy, just found out that you(Most probably) will also be reimbursed in your ICO fees by codechef. More details here: Invitation to ICO practice contest 1

For 2 mod 5, if you do 1/2 mod 5 its not even a thing, its not an integer anymore. For 2, its inverse is 3 when taken mode 5 because (2*3)%5 = 1. We only work with integers in modular arithmetic. As for how that formula came into being, you should study Fermat's Little Theorem and Chinese Remainder Theorem.

Inverse is not an array, its a function. It returns an integer such that (x*inverse(x))%mod = 1

Hi Sumeet, I have four questions for you

Q1. Which competitive programming platform is best suited for someone who wants to better in IOI and ICPC(in future)?

Q2. Should we practice by solving problems each category or should we solve random problems and learn the algorithms/data structures as we solve?

Q3. How much time should be given to programming each day taking into account the time spent in school, homeworks and other subjects?

Q4. How much time should be spent at most in a problem which is moderately hard for me?

Thank you so much for conducting this Q&A session :)

He's gonna #GoForGold :P