[anonetal]

Not denying the rest of what you say -- these teams are scary good, but A was really simple -- lot simpler than the first problems I remember from when I coached our school's team.

I just tried the brute force solution in Java, took me maybe 3-4 mins to code up and it finished with the max value of n in less than 1s.

[virulent]

I agree that A is really simple. I was pretty surprised to see that as a problem.

Was that 3-4 mins from first starting to read it to finishing a solution? If so then great, but personally I would've taken 10-15 minutes because I'd be carefully reading it first and wondering why it sounds so simple.

[anonetal]

Yes, I did know that someone did it in 5 mins, so that helped :)

I think it took me 9-10 mins in total, including testing on the provided inputs. I think I could have done it in a few mins faster 15 years ago when I competed (never made it to the Finals though). Also typically: one of the team members would immediately start coding up the first problem while others are working on the next problems, with the assumption that the first one is quite simple.