yesterday i went through the March cook-off. which had 5 question.i felt the questions is not maintained as it should be.if we look towards the long contest the question toughness level increasing is not so high a medium level programmer able to solve 4-5 problem easily.this is around 50% question asked in long question. while in cook off problem set there is only one problem that has 1300+ submission and the second problems submission only 114 and third question has also 110 submission,many mid-level programmer somehow managed to solve second question in O(n^2)which is simply dynamic programming problem.i also did it in O(n^2) but the time limit was strict after looking through editorial i felt ashamed, it was easy,but the logic used was not captured at the time of competition by everyone who give a try to it. I think the second question should have time limit more then as it was or string length should be limited to pass in quadratic time.I know codechef here to teach us more about logic and increase programming knowledge.but logic was not too easy to capture. i request other participant to give views on this.and hope from next time setter gives also attention to the difficulty level of problem.
Thanks.