Top Competitive Programmer vs. LeetCode's HARDEST Questions

A top competitive programmer from the Codeforces/CodeChef realm (with almost zero prior interview experience) takes on the hardest questions known to LeetCode to find out... how good is competitive programming, really? Is it enough to dominate even the hardest questions that LeetCode has to offer? Or will these questions be enough to stump me? Find out in this video experiment.

(yes, lowest solve rate doesn't necessarily mean hardest, but it's the best I could do, and they were pretty hard anyway)

Questions

Music:

Sthlm Sunset by Ehrling
(not exactly sure how to credit, the given link is dead)

This Is For You (Prod. by Lukrembo)

Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:17 Format
0:02:15 Q1 (hardest, 14.2%)
0:23:01 Q1 - Recap
0:24:06 Q2 (2nd hardest, 15.0%)
0:53:46 Q2 - Recap
0:56:01 Q3 (3rd hardest, 15.7%)
1:04:05 Q3 - Recap
1:04:37 Conclusion

[jeremyvonhatten]

Good content for sure.
Would love to hear more commentary about how you break the problem down.

[ScienceSeekho]

This dude has replaced the word "HARD" with "FUN".
That's the secret to MAANG

[cuddledog]

Dude, I literally just started learning how to prgram, but I love watching these videos haha. Just watching the thought process is interesting

[spaceclones]

this is the most useful series Colin, please more of leetcode hards

[nalinraj]

Video idea !! : do 100 leetcode easy questions under 30 minutes i guarantee you it will blow up something similar with medium level questions

[dcp]

You are built different lol. Can’t wait to see where your career takes you! I’m sure you will be involved in some cool impactful engineering somewhere down the road!

Question for you, have you hit diminishing returns growth-wise with algos? Not knocking the fun aspect of it or anything but SWE has so many domains outside of DS&A that are worth diving deep into as well.

How’s your sys design? OOP? TDD? Can you work across the stack?

Wishing you the best bro! Keep learning and growing!

[toraso]

I'm just starting to get into this field and this looks insane

[Arcvx]

Colin really stepped up the editing with this video. Kudos.

[yamiplays]

I get so annoyed when I am unable to come up with a logic.. Sometimes the logic sounds so absurd that I question myself if I know code💀

[uptonogood]

just found out this channel, i'm so glad i did

[kevinstefanov]

LeetCode's hardest problems are a piece of cake compared to what's on CodeForces. These problems are considered AT MOST average difficulty on there. That's what I used to prepare for coding interviews, and it worked. I nailed pretty much all of them.

[cyber_dbs]

me (while looking at the first problem) : huh! this is so easy, lemme pause this video and code..
me (Later) : *Struggling for 3-4 hours only to find that the algorithm sucks for several testcases*

[olayinkaanifowose]

do a competitive programmer vs project Euler problems

[likeXaXprodigy]

Super impressed how quickly you came up with the "black magic" solution for the n >= 20 case in Q1- had to stop and think for a while to understand.

For others wondering: note that in the 6 <= n <= 20 case, it takes sum(x // 3 for x in g) replacements to ensure there is no group of identical characters of at least 3 in a row. Deleting 1 element of 0 mod 3 groups, followed by 2 elements of 1 mod 3 groups, followed by 3 elements of 2 mod mod 3 groups (until the length is 20) is a greedy solution to minimizing um(x // 3 for x in g) with the minimum number of deletions. Note that because we never fully delete a group, we don't have to worry about what kind of group (uppercase, lowercase, digit) is being deleted.

[anikevin]

Then there's me struggling with almost all medium questions. At least I don't suck at lc easies anymore.

[michaelcasana]

Awesome! I saw the thumbnail and title and clicked immediately. Great video

[nguyendatz]

I think content competitive programmer vs leetcode contest is very cool, u can try it

[kittel-dev]

thanks for sharing your though process!

[bukshotaz]

love the videos.. new at programing it all looks like black magic... I would love more explanation on why you do what you do.. LOL

[MonteLogic]

Hello, I like the effort. Good vid but I would think it would be good idea to reduce the size of that clock as it can get annoying.