Do you indeed have good rote learning skills tho? In my experience the people that do well at TopCoder etc. tend to be good rote learners.
Sounds to me like you actually got accepted for the smartness, not the other way around.
Most of the TC like problems seem to be about quickly associating the problem with an already known algo/s and adjusting it to fit the problem?
I did Informatics Olympiads in middle school. The people that did well seemed to basically memorize TAOCP or Cormen.
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Do you indeed have good rote learning skills tho? In my experience the people that do well at TopCoder etc. tend to be good rote learners. Sounds to me like you actually got accepted for the smartness, not the other way around.
Most of the TC like problems seem to be about quickly associating the problem with an already known algo/s and adjusting it to fit the problem? I did Informatics Olympiads in middle school. The people that did well seemed to basically memorize TAOCP or Cormen.