I was the author of problem KILLKTH and I am sorry that I messed up in my first contest as problem setter on codechef. There were some issues regarding problem during contest but I never got to know that some suboptimal solutions are getting AC, I know it was my mistake I hadn’t checked too many AC submissions and the ones encountered were good enough. I am really sorry. Nevertheless, I learnt a lot of things out of this and will try to nullify these the next time I set some problem (If I get this golden opportunity again).
I would like to thanks Triveni sir for pointing out my mistakes and helpping me in improving myself as a problem setter.
In my opinion, the exponential function is all right as long as the scores aren’t too varying (that might mean, in our case, tighter constraints, for example 10,000 or even 100,000 blocks instead of only 1,000 which would eliminate quadratic algorithms). For example, in a recent problem about Santa and the presents, which was a minimization problem, the scores were rather reasonable.
Sorry, but what you have written here makes almost no sense.
You can multiply all scores by 1e9 in your first example to get bigger absolute difference, if you want to
At practice it depends on particular problem - for some of them such scoring function works well, for some it makes no sense. Problem being about maximization or minimization is not really related to it - issues are possible with both kinds of tasks.
Participants also solve the same problems but they are not paid, so why should you be paid to do the same ?
You serious? The contestants are voluntarily solving problems while a tester is not voluntarily creating test sets. Its a job. they should be paid. If someone voluntarily wants to create test sets then that’s different.
I do not understand your logic, by that logic no body should be paid anything in the world if a counter example of such work being free (for friends for example) exists. If I drive my friend to office for free doesn’t mean I am obliged to do that for free for everyone else in the world.
I thought 5 easy problems was a mistake. But knowing it was intentional is very disappointing @admin . Hmmm guess the golden age of codechef is over. It sucks when your rating drops when others beat you by doing the harder ones with brute force. Because not everyone is a fan of brute force.
For some reason I get this feeling that you guys are doing this to get more registration to CCDSAP. I get that you need money and all but not at the cost of quality.
