[searene]

Me too, algorithms are extremely hard for me at first. It took me a really long time to solve easy problems, and I could only solve 1~2 middle-level problems in one day. But finally, I managed to handle them by getting to know some effective learning strategies, e.g.

1. Explain to yourself how algorithms work, like a teacher teaching his/her students. 2. It's even impossible to explain to yourself when facing some middle-level/hard problems. Then I got another good idea: write everything down on papers. Finally, I found out that it was not that hard to solve these problems.

There are a lot of other learning strategies. In retrospect, I think it's lucky to be an engineer. Although it's hard, tough, brain-racking, I get to know a lot of learning strategies along the road. Sometimes you wonder if others are way smarter than you, but maybe they just know some learning strategies that you don't know, and they never give up.