You know the feeling. You spend hours crafting the perfect joke: clever setup, unexpected twist, just the right amount of chaos. Putting tape over the sensor of a mouse, changing the keyboard language to Russian, pressing Ctrl+Shift+Q+Q on your friend’s ChromeBook. Just to find out that your friend only uses their trackpad, they are actually Russian, and that they use a MacBook. You say “April Fools” with confidence, and they look at you with concern. We have all been there, and at the end of the day, you give up hope and go on DMOJ…

Welcome to the 3rd iteration of the April Fools' Day Contest.

Here, wrong answers might feel right. Accepted solutions might feel suspicious. Constraints may or may not be trustworthy. Some problems were designed with a punchline in mind, others lost theirs somewhere between idea and implementation.

You will:

• Overthink something that was meant to be trivial
• Underthink something that was way more sophisticated
• Spend hours upon hours confused
• Question the sanity of the problemsetters

And that is completely sane.

So go ahead. Submit that solution you’re not entirely confident in. Trust the samples (or don’t). Laugh at absurdity. And remember:

Even if your code WA, just be happy that it didn’t CE.

Good luck, and may your RTE’s be intentional.

The problem setters are Tinyfold and Sucram314.

The contest organizer is Riolku.

Special thanks to we_forgot_to_get_testers for testing and feedback on the problems!

The contest will run from April 1st, 00:00 EST to April 8th, 00:00 EST.

There will be 14 problems, each weighted equally.

All problems will be open for the full duration of the contest. The contest will be unrated, and the scoreboard will be public.