Week 8 Cold Revisit

This week, before pushing into the second half, re-solve about six prior problems cold: no notes, no prior code open, no AI, the standard 25-minute struggle floor on each, spread across Friday and the weekend. The first solve taught the pattern; this blind re-solve is what makes it stick. Week 8 carries a wider revisit than usual because it is the midpoint, and recognition across the whole first half is exactly what the second half will lean on.

This cold revisit and the consolidation block in the week README are the same midpoint set, not two separate obligations: together they are about six cold re-solves (Reorder List, which is fixed, plus five of your choice from Weeks 1 to 6) plus the one-page midpoint reflection. Log the six in .tutor/revisit-log.md.

The problems

  1. Reorder List (Week 6, Linked List). https://leetcode.com/problems/reorder-list/ This one is fixed: it fuses three linked-list primitives (find the middle, reverse a half, merge two halves), and re-deriving all three cold is the test.
  2. Five more of your choice from Weeks 1 to 6. Pick deliberately, not for comfort. Good heuristics: choose patterns whose cue you could not name instantly if you saw the problem cold today; spread across different weeks rather than clustering in one; and favour a problem that bit you the first time over one that came easily. Write down, before you start, why you picked each of the five.

How to run the revisit

  • Do not look up which pattern any problem belongs to. Recognizing it cold, from the problem statement alone, is the entire point of the exercise; the tutor will not tell you.
  • Start each from a blank file. Name the pattern aloud, write the plain-English approach as a comment, then code.
  • Apply the 25-minute floor to each independently. If you stall past the floor, use the hint ladder, one rung per ask.
  • Submit each to LeetCode’s judge. The judge is the oracle, not the tutor.
  • Debrief each with the five questions in your commit message, and log the outcome in .tutor/revisit-log.md.

None of these has to be a heap problem, and in fact Reorder List is not; that is deliberate. The cold revisit trains recognition across the whole course, so the muscle you build is “read a cold statement and feel the pattern”, not “apply this week’s pattern again”. If any of the six comes back slower than you expect, that is the signal for where to spend your next stretch session, and a direct input to the midpoint reflection in the consolidation block.