Over the past few week, I’ve been diving deep into USACO problems to sharpen my competitive programming skills, and each problem has helped me improve in a specific algorithmic area. Problems like Just Green Enough, Rectangular Pasture, No Time to Paint, and Painting Fence Post helped me understand the power of prefix sums especially for handling range queries and updates efficiently. I also worked on problems like Cow Operation, Field Day Sequence, and The Great Revegation, which introduced me to Disjoint Set Union (DSU), a technique that made it easier to track and merge connected components quickly. Graph traversal problems like Dance Moves, Searching for Soulmate, and Sequence Construction challenged me to use DFS in creative ways to simulate operations or build valid sequences. I even explored bitwise operations and interval merging in Convolute Intervals, which showed me how lower level optimizations can make a big difference. Each of these problems felt like a puzzle that required logic, strategy, and a good grasp of algorithms. As I practiced, I gained more confidence in using techniques like prefix sums, DFS, DSU, and bit manipulation not just in isolation, but as tools I can mix and match to solve complex problems. If you’re curious about how I solved them or want to follow my journey, you can check out all my code on GitHub: https://github.com/Jasper-World/USACO.
Jasper World 