CCC '25 S2 - Cryptogram Cracking Club
View as PDFCanadian Computing Competition: 2025 Stage 1, Senior #2
Cyrene, the captain of the Cryptogram Cracking Club (CCC), came across a concerningly long cipher. Conveniently, this cipher is composed of lower-case characters (a-z). Comfortingly, the cipher is composed of a pattern that repeats infinitely.
Cyrene wishes to locate the -th character of the cipher. To make your job easier, the CCC members have extracted the repeated pattern and compressed it using the Run-Length Encoding (RLE) algorithm, which replaces consecutive repeated characters with a single occurrence of the character followed by a count of how many times it was repeated. For example, for the pattern
aaaabccdddd, the RLE algorithm outputs a4b1c2d4.
You are given the output of the RLE algorithm for a certain pattern. Can you determine the -th character of the long cipher that is formed by repeating this pattern infinitely?
Input Specification
The first line of input will consist of a string , representing a pattern produced by the RLE algorithm. The length of
will be at least
and at most
. Additionally, all numbers appearing in
are between
and
.
The next line of input contains a single integer , representing the index of the character you wish to locate, starting from index
.
The following table shows how the available marks are distributed:
| Marks | Bounds on |
Additional Constraints |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | All numbers appearing in |
|
| 3 | The length of the repeated pattern is at most |
|
| 3 | The length of the repeated pattern is at most |
|
| 3 | No additional constraints. |
Output Specification
Output the -th character of the long cipher.
Sample Input 1
r2d2
8
Sample Output 1
r
Explanation for Sample Output 1
The output of the RLE algorithm r2d2 corresponds to the pattern rrdd, which creates the infinitely long cipher rrddrrddrrddrrdd..., where the th character is
r. In this example, the th character is highlighted with a box around it.
Sample Input 2
a4b1c2d10
100
Sample Output 2
d
Explanation for Sample Output 2
The output of the RLE algorithm a4b1c2d10 corresponds to the pattern aaaabccdddddddddd. When repeated infinitely, the th character is
d.
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