Gennady Korotkevich a.k.a "tourist" - I heard this name about ~5 years ago among my friends who are into competitive programming. Only learned of his name today. It's impressive how good he is at such a young age.
There is a meta-structure to the problems that people can and do train for. I dabbled in this as a student (part of the BCS UK-wide competition winning team in .. '99 or thereabouts). You basically need to memorise "Introduction to Algorithms" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms , have a good practice in writing microparsers and output-formatting code (usually scanf/printf will do, sometimes you need something a bit more complicated), and have the right kind of puzzle-solving mentality.
Like Project Euler, sometimes you have to find a conceptual shortcut because the brute-force solution isn't feasible.
The BCS format involved four people and one computer, so work discipline, coding on paper, and a sort of extreme pair programming were important.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 29.7 ms ] thread(One of them started practicing 10 years ago [1]. The two other are active at topcoder since 2010 [2] and 2011 [3]).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich
[2] http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=229...
[3] http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=230...
Like Project Euler, sometimes you have to find a conceptual shortcut because the brute-force solution isn't feasible.
The BCS format involved four people and one computer, so work discipline, coding on paper, and a sort of extreme pair programming were important.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Pr...