Because there is a certain paragraph in this blog, please only share it point-to-point among the players, rather than spread it widely. I don't really want parents to see it.
I am a senior sophomore OIer, and it has been less than a year since I officially retired. During this period, instead of writing some memorable words, it is better to jump out of the category of "self" and share some of my cognition and views on OI with you from a more overall perspective. The purpose is to let the junior high school students and young girls see the road ahead, and let the senior high school students understand their footprints.
1. A unique model
Knowledge update
Let's start with the OI game schedule. After winning the first prize of NOIP, players can sign up for WC (time is from January to February). In May, even if the players did not enter the provincial team through the provincial election, they can still sign up for CTS (C). Among them, WC and CTS (C) are not only two rounds of selection for information training teams, but also opportunities for non-training team players to win prizes. And every year at WC, there will be training team players and former training team players to teach. Each year's CTS (C) will arrange the candidates of the candidate team (last year was the top 6 of the candidate team) to conduct English self-introduction and thesis defense. The score of this item is included in the training selection score according to a certain weight. For a team player, he not only needs to complete the problem, but also has to write a problem-solving report on some problems of the team's homework, and may even need to write a proposition report. If he enters the candidate team, then he must write a paper for the candidate team. Sometimes the 15 people who select the team will form a group to ask each other questions, which is called the candidate team mutual test.
Putting aside the reasons for "collecting money", why does the CCF arrange this? Because CCF understands that the update of OI's knowledge range can only be completed by excellent players with higher levels, and then the main force serving OI is also them , and WC and CTS are the process of popularizing new knowledge points to various players. For example: the CDQ divide-and-conquer appeared in Chen Danqi ’s paper in 2008, the speech of Chen Lijie ’s “Suffix Automata” in WC2012, the idea of binary grouping in the 2013 candidate team paper “Talking about several non-classical solutions to data structures” The polynomial inversion, ln, exp and other skills appeared in the 2015 training team papers, and the simulation fee flow problem taught by WC in 2019. The mandatory problem-solving report and proposition report are a good training for them to work on the problem.
Those trendy knowledge points will be gradually passed down through the Internet platform. It appeared in the blogs of those big brothers at first, and then some high-level competition topics (such as WC, CTS), followed by many strong school simulation games, and finally the real questions of NOI, provincial election, and NOIP. In the transmission process, these ideas will be tested and measured for a certain period of time. Finally, we leave those knowledge points that can simplify the amount of code, are very applicable to certain problems, and have value for investigation. Within 1-5 years, we have to learn.
This arrangement undoubtedly brought very good results and added vitality to OI's knowledge system. The only flaw is the lack of judges who can understand the papers of the candidate teams. Every time when replying, the judges will always ask questions that are not of high quality and do not matter. Perhaps it is because the CCF also knows this. Except for some extreme cases, the score of the candidate team ’s thesis defense does not affect the final national team list.
Propositional story
Participants of those training teams will join the Tsinghua or Peking University Algorithms Association after graduation, and become contestants in 1-5 years. The job of proposition needs to find an "inspiration", which is the core idea of this question. After that, we still have to go through a series of steps, such as writing the title, writing the benchmark, designing the part, and verifying the correctness and strength of the data, to truly complete the process of making a question. Generally speaking, there are hundreds to thousands of yuan for the proposition of NOI series events, but these fees are just a kind of "hard work". From a utilitarian point of view, it is a better choice when giving lectures or concentrating on academics. They did it out of a feeling of OI.
But the guarantee of the quality and quantity of the proposition, even the confidentiality, can only be guaranteed by themselves. If near the NOI just happens to be the exhaustion period of people's idea, then the quality of NOI is bound to be not high. If the person who created the question happens to be preparing for the mid-term exam of the university and so on, it is difficult for him to do the work of the question completely. Even if the person who made the question put out a question very carefully, but this question may not be suitable for appearing in the game because of the difficulty of the difficulty. It may also be because of these reasons that there have been many unreasonably designed games in OI history. The difficulty of ZJOI2018 is too high, the degree of distinction is too low, the problem of CTSC2018 is wrong, the phenomenon of the original problem of NOIP2018, and the unreasonable distribution of knowledge points of CTS2019 are all fresh examples.
The method of improving quality relies heavily on the feedback exchange between OIer and the propositioner, forcing the questioner to make adjustments. You will see the question of "how to evaluate xxxx (a certain game)" on Zhihu, which is the interaction between the person who made the question and the player. The comments below often express the player's experience and the experience of the person who made the question, for example https://www.zhihu.com/question/333860946/answer/755528534 . Recently, some players have also discussed the criteria for questioning in the process of their own mock competitions, such as https://www.luogu.com.cn/blog/ouuan/to-be-a-good-problemsetter . After the question maker understands the score of a certain question and the player's evaluation of this question, he can understand the general level of the player and understand which types of questions are most valuable to the current player. In 2017, a person who asked a question had a question called "Challenge". The positive solution is to use the underlying optimization (card often) to make the algorithm with a high theoretical complexity pass the incredible range ( \ (O (n ^ 2) \) Run 3e5, \ (O (n) \) run 2e8). On the day of the game, there were endless voices of criticism of the question. Since then, the quality of the questions from this person has changed a lot.
Learning process
As a player, you may be most concerned about the process of learning OI. At the level below the NOIP improvement group, learning knowledge points can be read by reading books, but above this, especially for the study of newer knowledge points, we must rely on online blogs. Blogs are generally completed by active players. But the quality of the blog is mixed, and the good and bad are uneven. If you search for lct on Baidu, there are 6 of the 10 articles and there is no splay after the findroot. Even for the players with higher level, the solution written by them may not be easy for others to understand, and in many cases it is simplified to only one sentence. A common problem is that when explaining knowledge points or topics, the focus is only on the conclusion and the algorithm process. It is not clear why the conclusion is correct and why the algorithm should think of these two problems. https://etaoinwu.com/blog/on-teaching-and-learning/ expressed similar ideas to me. Sometimes you see the solution shouting "too clever" and "too fairy", because you don't realize the whole process of thinking. In order to solve the problem of blog quality, we have established OI-wiki, shareOI, and Luo Gu's solutions have a strict review mechanism.
The learning materials on Luogu, LOJ, and UOJ are free, and online blogs can be directly searched, and face all OIers. In this era of resource sharing, as long as you are willing to study hard, you will have a wealth of information and topics to learn. This has to a certain extent bridged the gap between strong and weak schools. However, due to the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, learning cannot rely entirely on blogs and other materials. Players are required to bring them, and high-quality simulation questions are needed to increase the game experience. Often only strong schools can invite the excellent players from the previous session to lecture, and they can have simulation questions and OJs that are not open to the public. Therefore, the gap between strong schools and weak schools will also exist for a long time.
Another important aspect is lectures, which are also undertaken by high-level players. One of the lectures is to be hired at the institution, and the other is to lecture at your own alma mater (this includes active players and retired players). The former is characterized by a wide area of benefit, allowing more people to learn. The latter is characterized by fewer students, and it is easy to adjust the way of lectures to meet the needs of students in this school. Compared with the former, the latter is more voluntary. The former promotes the sharing of OI resources, while the latter plays a role in promoting the development of a school. This is not to say that the former is superior to the latter or the latter is superior to the former, in fact both are essential. Especially for our school, letting the previous one take the next one is an indispensable part of catching up with strong schools in other provinces. The development of a small group and the development of a large group are interrelated, and sometimes a good player in a school can drive the rise of a province.
A road never traveled
OI's knowledge has nothing to do with what we have learned in elementary and middle schools. It is not even related to the algorithms learned by universities and the mainstream computer science community. It is a relatively independent and closed system. We lack teachers who fully understand the OI knowledge system, we lack prosecutors who can make long-term propositions, and we lack professional researchers. We are faced with various unfavorable objective conditions, which are the difficulties that the other four major competitions do not have.
But we never gave up, we never backed down. We do our best to explore a mode that matches the characteristics of OI competition. Saying this to Dali is the practice of "the popularization of computers must be started from dolls"; to Xiaoli, it is an effort to adapt to the times.
After all, we have explored a path that has never been taken before, and that is the OI mode dominated by OIer itself! We use the already trained OI players to do the work of knowledge introduction, proposition and teaching, use the previous OIer to drive the next OIer, and then let the next one drive the next. We use the Internet platform to take advantage of its rapid information dissemination and connect all OI players into a whole. The role of competition coaches is more to maintain this model and drive this model.
This model is biased towards "generating electricity with love", and its core foundation is the OIers' long-lasting feelings about OI itself . Its advantage is to give the OI community a strong vitality, give players a lot of freedom to learn, and also form a good protection for the over-commercialization and utilitarianization of OI. It also makes the concept of "OIer group" a great place.
But it is also easy to think of it as fragile and immature. You can see its flaws in the front. Once the OIers have not continued to serve OI due to some practical reasons, it will inevitably put the system at risk of collapse. But it is very irreplaceable , no matter whether it is knowledge introduction, question preparation, or teaching, only OIer is competent. This model is almost the only solution under real conditions, so it is difficult to shake. So what we should think about is to make some improvements on the level of methods and methods to make the future of OI better.
2. The value of OIer
pioneer
You open OJ and think about a problem. You are satisfied with the exquisiteness of the OJ page, you revel in the beauty of the algorithm world. Have you ever wondered who came up with these problems, and have you ever thought about who is the builder and maintainer of OJ? They are a special OIer group. Among them are the founder of Luogu, kkksc003, the founder of LOJ, menci, and the founder of UOJ, vfk.
You can get a glimpse of the year from http://vfleaking.blog.uoj.ac/blog/909 , http://vfleaking.blog.uoj.ac/blog/4 and https://loj.ac/article/45 They founded some ideas of UOJ and LOJ. We take two paragraphs in the first article:
"I have to say that today is a sad night. We are standing here at this time, connecting the past and the future. I thought our plan would be our future, but did not know that the power of the waves hitting the beach is stronger than the hurricane. Where does UOJ come from? Come? Is the UOJ tonight the same UOJ when it was released a year ago? Why do we slowly forget the most pious beginning, and gradually away ... So I realized that we should go back and look back at the original Original point. Initially, I was dissatisfied with the topic of the OI world. At first, I had a lot of difficult brain holes in the industry and cancer. I came up with it for everyone. The first was NOI2013, which caused me to think about the OI competition ... We What I want to build is an OJ that can freely evaluate various types of questions, an OJ with high-quality questions, and an OJ that regularly holds high-quality competitions-an OJ that can bring OIer thinking and harvest. "
"I remembered my original sentence 'Never lack or lack", I remembered the story of Rockefeller and Concord Hospital that inspired me for a long time: we are going to build a hospital with the highest standards and become a benchmark in the Chinese medical community-and we I know clearly that there are hundreds of millions of OJs in the world who are not lacking in the UOJ family. The only thing we have to do is to gather the best and most informative OIers and build an OJ with unmatched quality. "
More than 500 UOJ topics, thousands of LOJ topics, and tens of thousands of OIer ... Today you will see the OJs of various schools growing like mushrooms, thanks to the platform they built with lines of code. Today you will hear OIer's extensive discussion on competitions and topics, and those trendy ideas actually come from the definitions of "good questions" and "poisonous tumor questions" elaborated by vfk in those blogs. Today we trace back from our own growth path, and we can always trace the resources they have created.
They are lighthouses, they are guides. They have opened up a path for OI resource sharing, and they have created tens of thousands of value with dozens of people. In the later society, it is difficult to see people like them who fully adhere to their original intentions and dreams and dedicate themselves to everything without asking for any return. We hope that their words will shine in the history of OI.
Indispensable role
It is true that it is difficult for us to make a great contribution to the entire OI community like them, and the attitude towards them is only to stay at the level of "although not reachable, but yearn for". So where is our value?
Many school coaches will ask seniors to give us lectures when we are still in junior or senior year. And when we were in the second year of high school, we were asked to give lectures to the next year's students. We reprocess and reorganize what we get from the seniors, and then pass it on to the next term. In the past two years, we have changed from a receiver of knowledge to a communicator of knowledge. We have become people with batons in our hands, and people connecting the past and the future.
If there is a good player among us, then a greater contribution will be made. First, it will attract more OIer to study in this school, and then further improve the level of the next player. For example, I chose to enter Huaer 2 instead of upper secondary when I was in the third year, because I saw that Huaer CMO entered 5 training teams in 2017, and only one in upper secondary. The second is to raise the goal of the whole province, and then to drive the level of the whole province. Before 2016, Shanghai's goal may be to win more silver medalists. But because excellent players like Lu Shiqing and He Wenyang appeared, the special agents began to work towards the goal of gold medal. He will hand out the topics of those good OIers in person, evaluate them personally, will arrange several simulation matches for the city's players before NOIP / CSP, and will invite players from other provinces to give lectures. Eventually, Shanghai achieved this goal on CTS, APIO, and NOI.
Even if you are only the OIer of the second, third, and high school, and have not yet reached the stage of giving lectures to the younger students, you will unconsciously affect many people. In this era of highly shared resources, what you write inadvertently may be seen by hundreds of people, and then hundreds of people pass on to more people. Like the "JOISC 2020 Autism" I wrote, the reading volume has reached 530 people, and the OIer I know is only 100 people. Maybe these 530 people will also pass on to their friends and their next contestants. Maybe 1,000 people will directly or indirectly see the solution I wrote.
Another value
In his career, an OIer not only has personal value (such as winning the first prize, entering the provincial team, and entering the training team), but also has another value. That is the value of the individual to the OIer community.
Many times the realization of personal value is also the realization of this value, this value is a continuation of personal value, because the more high-level players can create more value for the OI community. But unlike personal value, this value affects it for a longer period of time and has a wider range of influence. Maybe after we retired, the awards we received were just the numbers on OIerdb. Personal value is taken away after an OIer retires, but this value is something left after an OIer is retired , it will not be outdated. What you do for the OIer around you is like burying a seed, which will take root and germinate within a few years, grow into a big tree, and even reproduce more life. The OIer of the vfk generation hardly thought that the UOJ he founded would benefit so many people. The OIer of the generations of Wang Yuzhong, Lu Shiqing, and Wang Runze did not expect that their efforts would make Shanghai enter the three training teams at NOI2019. But all this has happened in the near future.
So when we are learning knowledge, we must also think about what I can do for the OIer around me, what I can do for the whole school, what I can do for the whole city, what I can do for the whole OIer ? For example, creating questions, giving lectures, sharing, such as writing articles in a blog. Even Tangenter's writing "Integer Overflow" to organize the 2016-2019 OI history is also a contribution. Even if we cannot do many things for others, we must understand the contribution that others bring to the OI community, and we must also be grateful and respectful to those seniors who have paid for us.
3. Small and humble insistence
Time, luck, and destiny are cruel words for OIers. No matter how strong OIer is, there are moments of retirement. OIer, who works harder, can hardly guarantee that he will be able to get the equivalent of his contribution in the provincial election or NOI. This is a fact that many OIer knows well, and it is also the source of our powerlessness.
Because of this, some people chose to treat OI as a passenger in their lives, without paying too much energy and emotion to it. But some people still regard OI as their own destination, even as the whole life. The reason is because they have given too much meaning and value to the word OI.
They insisted on suspending classes, insisted on "confrontation" with the class teacher, and even parents, and insisted on the goals in their hearts. They gave up sleeping time to play cf, abandoned cultural classes to brush simulation games. Sometimes, they have to face loneliness, incomprehension and fear of their future. You can say that this is perseverance, perseverance, and courage. But in the face of fate, this is small and humble. The result of an exam is unpredictable, the difference between a character may be the difference between 100 points and 0 points, and the difference between a partial point is the gap of more than 20 names. The most diligent people dare not say that they can control their own future.
However, we see that some parents or teachers deny all the meaning of OI, ignore all their efforts, and laugh at their two years of hard work. These people regard everything that is not mainstream as non-competitive, and regard everything that has no immediate effect as useless. Other parents regard this road as just a shortcut beyond the college entrance examination, and do not know much about the process of their giving. Everything goes backward.
They are by our side. We are OIer with them, and we want to be the people who fight alongside them. A sentence "It's okay to pass the exam", some gossip outside of the OI topic may relieve their sense of stress and loneliness. Discussing topics with them, learning algorithms together, and playing simulation games together are substantial help for their success.
If you feel that they are far away from you, please do not judge their choices simply with good and bad pros and cons like some people. Please do not hold an attitude that has nothing to do with me.
If you happen to be the OIer who chooses to be desperate, please believe that there are countless OIers that support you, please believe that your efforts will eventually reward you at some point, please believe that no matter how you grow It's harvested. But I must also tell you that since you have the courage to keep going, you must also have the courage to bear all the results it brings.
postscript
In fact, my idea of writing this blog can be traced back to some words that the LCA told us during the Beijing University training. After his speech, I learned about OI diary, and I learned about OI survey. I saw a former OIer actively looking for information, recording what happened in the OI world in the past few years from the perspective of a player, and even one person wanted to compile a complete OI history. I found that OIers have done a lot of things beyond exploring knowledge, and they are all very meaningful things like seeking knowledge. So I did some simple thinking about some of the status quo in the OI world, and organized it into this blog.
From the perspective of writing an article, the first and second sections can constitute a complete theme, while the third section seems a bit extravagant. But there are really many people around me who are desperate to engage in OI, but they are actually in my school, and the environment they face is not optimistic. I especially want to say something for them, but I do n’t know when I can say it, but I do n’t know where to start. So I took this opportunity to speak my heart for them.
Finally, thank you for reading this blog, and hope this blog can bring you something meaningful.