Contest Experience: Leetcode Biweekly Contest 111

About the contest:

This contest was organized by Leetcode on Aug 19, 2023, it consisted of 4 questions and the time given to solve them was 1 hour 30 minutes i.e. 90 mins.

Link of the contest: Leetcode Biweekly Contest 111

Perks/Prizes/Offers:

Rank	Coins
1st	5000
2nd	2500
3rd	1000
4 – 50th	300
51 – 100th	100
101 – 200th	50
Participate	5
First Time Participate	200
Participate Biweekly + Weekly Contests in Same Week	35

Overview of the Questions:

Problem	Topic	Difficulty	Time Taken	No. of Submission
Count Pairs Whose Sum is Less than Target	Arrays	Easy	2 min	1
Make String a Subsequence Using Cyclic Increments	String and Two Pointer	Medium	8 min	1
Sorting Three Groups	Dynamic Programming	Medium	25 min	2
Number of Beautiful Integers in the Range	Digit Dynamic Programming	Hard	30 min	2

Problem 1: Count Pairs Whose Sum is Less than Target

Difficulty: Easy (3 points)

Pre-requiste to solve that problem: Arrays and Simulation

Approximate time taken to solve by you: 01:47 min

Number of Attempts by you: 1

My Experience: The first question was a cakewalk. It just took me 2 min to solve the problem.

Accepted Solution: We could simply just run two for loop and check for the condition asked, if true increase the counter by one, else continue. Time Complexity: O(N^2) and Space Complexity: O(1).

Problem 2: Make String a Subsequence Using Cyclic Increments

Difficulty: Medium (4 points)

Pre-requiste to solve that problem: String and Two Pointers

Approximate time taken to solve by you: 08:00 min

Number of Attempts by you: 1

My Experience: Once you get the intuition the question was doable.

Accepted Solution:Did this question with help of two pointer and a while loop. inside the loop whenever the condition was satisfied I incremented both pointers by one and if not only the last pointer was incremented. Time Complexity: O(N) and Space Complexity: O(1).

Problem 3: Sorting Three Groups

Difficulty: Medium (5 points)

Pre-requiste to solve that problem: Dynamic programming

Approximate time taken to solve by you: 25:00 min

Number of Attempts by you: 2

My Experience: At first I wasn’t able to recognise that this question is a dp problem, as I gone through multiple test cases I realised this can only be solved by the concept of dp. This was a hard for me.

Accepted Solution: Since the constraints were low I solved this question in O(N^3). Time Complexity: O(N^3) and Space Complexity: O(N^2).

Problem 4: Number of Beautiful Integers in the Range

Difficulty: Hard (6 points)

Pre-requiste to solve that problem: Digit Dynamic programming

Approximate time taken to solve by you: I wasn’t able to solve during the live contest but I did upsolve this question that took me around 30 min.

Number of Attempts by you: 2+

My Experience: During the contest I solved this question using brutz force technique and it got me tle.

CONCLUSION:

I was able to solve 3/4 questions this time. I wasn’t able to solve all 4 of those problems as this contest was a bit hard for me. But I learned a lot. By giving Contest you gain many thing like speed, consistency, motivation(sometimes gets demotivate but that’s part of the journey), time management, pressure handling,new concepts etc. which teach us a lot.

Keep Hustling, Keep Coding!!!!!!!!!!