two great jokes

After stopping for almost two years I restarted my problem solving recently, in one of my several moves to "keep my brain alive". Being out of touch with it for so long I am very rusty now, already forgotten all the little tricks hidden inside the problems to trap me. Like the fact that the first value read in is not necessarily always smaller than the second value.

Thankfully there is a forum full of helpful people who pointed out all the hidden tricks, so I can correct my mistakes before submitting.

"Marking" is done by a robot, as in a software bot, and the data it uses to test the programs we submitted is kept secret; all it tells us is the end result, so awaiting the result yields the same feeling as receiving my O Level or A Level results.



At that moment nothing can be happier than seeing the word "Accepted". And nothing can be worse, in my own opinion, than seeing the word "Wrong Answer", because to me its the most vague result among those it gives.

Right now I have only solved a pathetic number of forty problems, out of the two thousand over problems it offers. And to complete this joke my ratio of submissions to accepted problems is 5.875 : 1, which means on average I have to submit a particular solution six times before I finally get it correct.

Wahaha.

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My first major problem after "upgrading" to Service Pack 1 has just surfaced. Apparently my save files for my racing game DiRT have all been "corrupted". I check that my files are still there, but somehow the game can't read them, which include the many days of effort I put in to complete my "career".

Service Pack 1. Wahaha.