Hi,

can there be duplicates in the set of numbers?
I mean something like a_i = a_j and i != j.

Thanks,
S.

Yes, there can be duplicates.

And for the input:

Code:

2 5 5

is it a valid output?

Code:

2 1 5 1 5

It is so bad that it is not in the problem statement that the numbers can be equal, and also in the sample input all numbers are different.

My solution doesn't need any special processing for duplicates.
Anyway, it's a little trick. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the problem description.

minhduc wrote:

QUOTE:
My solution doesn't need any special processing for duplicates.
Anyway, it's a little trick. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the problem description.

My all previous methods assumed that the numbers are different, and as you can see on my stat table all of them scored 0, because these are totally broken for same numbers. But I've modified it to work correctly for duplicates, it was not a large effort, changed about 5 lines in my code.

You can see that among the top 20 contestants 4 of them scored 0, but previous rounds this happened only once. I think that those programs are good for no duplicates. I don't see reason posting (almost) broken problems, in all tetscases there are duplicates but not in the sample input and it is not noted in the text. And there are lots of trailing spaces both in sample input and output, I haven't asked this because my code was AC for it, but it was quite annoying, knowing that for example in acm uva you can get very easily WA if you don't print the required number of spaces/blank lines.

My solution was one that didn't handle duplicates.. though would have been trivial to fix. Though this was my own fault, I hate problems that try to trick you like this, when it would have been so easy to mention the fact in either the problem or examples.

The fact that this causes you to lose 100 points rather than 5 or something similar just ruined the whole competition too

We cannot guarantee to cover all details in a problem description. The problem NUMBERS description is correct. If you have doubts, please ask for a clarification. In fact, there was a question about whether there were duplicates or not in this forum. So check the forum once or twice during the round! Anyway, it's a pity for you to get a 0 for this problem. I generated random numbers since duplicates are not important for my solution.