The bracket problem: why I always finished the practice tasks

At the 2002 Latvian Olympiad in Informatics I was the only contestant to score 100 on two problems. Progmeistars gave me its special prize for it, which goes to the quality of solutions, not to the total score.

Behind one of those problems was a training session. In class we had worked through a problem about an “operation with brackets”, and at the olympiad almost the same one came up. I always finished practice problems to the end, and I was the only one who solved it for full marks. The strongest student in our group lost tests on time: in the output he had used + instead of bitwise OR.

Later that year came bronze at the Baltic olympiad in Vilnius and gold at the International Olympiad in Korea, and for the olympiads, awards from the Government of Latvia and the Riga City Council (its Golden Pen).

What I took from it: a practice problem you finish to the end will one day turn up in the exam.