Advanced mapm Tips

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of how mapm works. If you do not, read the documentation at mapm.mathadvance.org.¹ Basic fluency with the command line is expected, and for Windows users, an understanding of the Unix commands and the ability to translate them to whatever shell you are using.²

Collaboration

mapm is meant to be used with other people, but it is not opinionated on how you do this. There are two main ways: Dropbox³ and Git. I would recommend the former.

The problem directory for a profile foo is ~/.config/mapm/problems/foo. So you can symlink whatever directory contains your problems to the aforementioned path. For example, Math Advance uses ~/Dropbox/MAC/problems as our problems directory, so we would run

ln -s ~/Dropbox/MAC/problems ~/.config/mapm/problems/mathadvance

as our profile is called mathadvance.

You can do something similar with Git; just don’t forget to push and pull when appropriate.

Multiple contest files for the same contest

mapm was designed for Math Advance contests, first and foremost — this means it works best with MAT as well as “smaller” contests like the AMCs and AIME. Something expansive like HMMT would not fit well in a single contest file. Fortunately, there is a sane way to compile contests in mapm.

Let’s use HMMT as an example. The Combinatorics and Geometry rounds have nothing to do with each other — how hard problem X is on combo has no effect on how hard problem Y is on geo. Therefore, the two rounds can be considered independent, and thus should have separate contest files. It may also be worth noting that they do not need a separate template file; a subject template variable would suffice.

Here is a heuristic for this independence: do these rounds exist in separate PDFs? For ARML and MAT, where the subject and difficulty distribution of rounds should be taken as a composite, the entire individual test is in one PDF. Thus they should have one contest file.

No solutions

Sometimes you might be lazy and not want to put solutions in a problem. If you’re using a release of mapm-cli before v2.1.0, you can pass solutions: [] into your problem file. If you’re using a release after v2.1.0, the field is optional and the library will interpret no solutions field as an empty array.

cli tricks

Change default editor

When running mapm edit, the EDITOR environment variable is used. It is strongly recommended that you set it to a terminal editor, like nano or vim, so as to minimize context switching.

List problem names

There is no built-in feature to list problems in the command line interface, but mapm find show should suffice; it finds every problem, and shows no tags. You may also pass filters into find for a filtered list.