Thanks for mentioning me, but I didn't deserve it this time.
The only thing I did was comparing the difficulty of two problems. I didn't even read the other ones. So, this is definitely not testing :)

Problem statement used word "some". And it meant "some". It didn't mean "every". So I don't understand your problem.

I can't understand your question. What is the problem with the word "some"? I can't see any.

Codeforces could replace all occurrences of "%lld" to "%I64d" :)

What is "long_words.txt"? You must read from standard input.

I think this problem is not easier than deciding whether two bipartite graphs are isomorphic or not. In turn, that problem is pretty hard.

I think they are correct

Me too :)

he only said it to get rid of you

I guess you misread the problem statement. We have N numbers from [0,M). Otherwise, all 4 functions can be maximized easily in O(log M).

I think you should check your hardware (there are special test programs to do that). This can be RAM or HDD failures. Also your CPU or the whole system may be overheated (especially if you encountered those BSODs during this crazy summer).

I use win7 on several computers since it was a release candidate and I don't remember seeing BSOD once.

Thank you so much! I've always wanted to see it. Please, post here the full windows 7 source code. I can't compile this piece.

Such variation of game is called misere. You can read about misere nim (and about some other game theory stuff) here: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/Game_Theory/comb.pdf. It also contains examples of games where normal play is easy to analyze but misere play is much more difficult. So there is no general rule to apply normal game strategy to misere game.

You can solve it in O(n*log(n)). First find a convex hull, and then use the method described here.

I think for the beginners it's important to concentrate fully on the solving part. Only after you feel you can't solve anything more, you can lock your problems and try to hack someone.

As for the new format, I also think that the ability to code and hack at the same time make no sense. The contests become more like a game. And the genre is real-time strategy :) Like WarCraft or something... I hate this kind of games so maybe that's the reason I feel this way about the new format.

You can't just iterate through all pairs of blocks. There are too many of them. Think how to only merge those blocks that are connected to each other. You can refer to my solution for example.

Q3. Should I do anything special right after a contest starts?
A3. Yes, you should. Open all problems in different browser tabs as soon as possible.
There is a good chance you won't be able to do that later, because of the server's occasional shutdowns.

:)

I think it's physically impossible :)

No I didn't know that before, I was just very lucky to find it :)
Once I've heard some lecture where some guy was talking about a criteria
to check whether a knapsack problem is greedy solvable. I thought maybe this problem
is also has a known solution, so I went straight to google and started to search. And after
some time I've found this.

It's a known problem... You can read this, for example:
http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~yrobert/algo/coins2.ps

It's not enough for problem setter to find any solution... Ideally he should find all solutions and tweak the constraints in order to not let any of the easier than desired solutions pass. He should also think about possible heuristics and try to break them all.

So, solving a problem is often the easiest part :)

I think the easiest way to solve this problem is to simulate all possible games with backtracking. Once you find the given position it's not hard to determine whose next move is or who has just won the game. If the given position was not found during the backtracking then it's obviously an illegal position. This way you only have to implement very straightforward things, like recursive backtracking, and you don't have to do a boring case analysis which also is pretty error prone.

>You do it with taste, like a real military man, like a Marshall ;-)
Apparently, you've never seen a real military Marshall... It's usually hard for them to get their ass out of their chairs.

The picture is metaphoric indeed. But I see it a little bit different:
Hadi attacks the big lion and a small baby lion. Baby lion apparently is rolling on the floor laughing,
with his legs up. The wise big lion tries to stop him and says something like: Cut it out, son, it's not polite to laugh out loud at humans, they have no idea of what they're doing.
:)