codeforces#P1178E. Archaeology
Archaeology
Description
Alice bought a Congo Prime Video subscription and was watching a documentary on the archaeological findings from Factor's Island on Loch Katrine in Scotland. The archaeologists found a book whose age and origin are unknown. Perhaps Alice can make some sense of it?
The book contains a single string of characters "a", "b" and "c". It has been pointed out that no two consecutive characters are the same. It has also been conjectured that the string contains an unusually long subsequence that reads the same from both sides.
Help Alice verify this by finding such subsequence that contains at least half of the characters of the original string, rounded down. Note that you don't have to maximise the length of it.
A string $a$ is a subsequence of a string $b$ if $a$ can be obtained from $b$ by deletion of several (possibly, zero or all) characters.
The input consists of a single string $s$ ($2 \leq |s| \leq 10^6$). The string $s$ consists only of characters "a", "b", "c". It is guaranteed that no two consecutive characters are equal.
Output a palindrome $t$ that is a subsequence of $s$ and $|t| \geq \lfloor \frac{|s|}{2} \rfloor$.
If there are multiple solutions, you may print any of them. You don't have to maximise the length of $t$.
If there are no solutions, output a string "IMPOSSIBLE" (quotes for clarity).
Input
The input consists of a single string $s$ ($2 \leq |s| \leq 10^6$). The string $s$ consists only of characters "a", "b", "c". It is guaranteed that no two consecutive characters are equal.
Output
Output a palindrome $t$ that is a subsequence of $s$ and $|t| \geq \lfloor \frac{|s|}{2} \rfloor$.
If there are multiple solutions, you may print any of them. You don't have to maximise the length of $t$.
If there are no solutions, output a string "IMPOSSIBLE" (quotes for clarity).
Samples
cacbac
aba
abc
a
cbacacacbcbababacbcb
cbaaacbcaaabc
Note
In the first example, other valid answers include "cacac", "caac", "aca" and "ccc".