Cheating in June Long Contest 2013

Just want to bring it to the admin’s notice.
Problem - http://www.codechef.com/JUNE13/problems/SPMATRIX
Following set of solutions by different users are same:
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2274351
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2274321
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2274408
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2274500

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@admin see http://www.careercup.com/question?id=19286747
Clearly, someone has used unfair means to solve Delish.

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@admin: this thing will always happen in long contests. in order to solve a problem users try to google the possible resources related to a problem and learn new topics. they go to forums and even if they get a single hint then they start working on that logic. hence logic of many users come out to be the same.

Moreover, long contest is meant for this(at least, according to me). While solving a problem if one does not know the solution then go and learn the things and come back to submit it. If it is not the motto of long contest then the format of long contest should be changed. It should be changed in such a manner that users wont get time to look for the solution of a problem.

one of the possible solution that i have in mind is that keep a question open for specific amount of time depending upon the difficulty of the problem. This would not give users to have enough time to discuss a problem with other users or on a forum.

thanx.

5 Likes

We aware of this 4.
Actually I noticed about 10 pairs of identical submissions.
The fact that so many users solved my problem bother me so much that I spend some time to find cheaters :slight_smile:
I hope all duplicates will be ignored and the true AC-rate will be much smaller.

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They caught my eye today when suddenly the AC’ed users for your problem rose to 99 from 95 within a matter of 5 mins. The first thing i did after contest was to see their AC’ed submissions and voila! :wink:

Will the accepted submissions be ignored?
In my opinion these users should be disqualified from this contest.

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I suspect the number of people who solved this is high because what you’re asking for is a sequence on OEIS. Looking it up after I brute-forced N=4 was the first thing I did probably on day 2 or 3 of the competition… When I “finished” my competition a few days ago, there were like 30 solutions to this problem so I thought I’d leave it unsolved and check the editorial to see how you come up with the relation for this problem. However, when I logged back in today, like a 100 people had “solved” the problem, so I “solved” it as well… I guarantee that 80% of “solvers” can’t explain their sol.

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@iitr_sonu there is a difference between finding your own sources (papers, algorithms, etc, etc…) for solving a problem and asking someone else to solve it for you…

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@buda, those solutions are way too much alike. I went to oeis and I don’t see how so much similar solutions could have come from that… Maybe there are people who solve the contests together or something like that. Well, those are assumptions and I might be wrong. However it looks like the number of cheaters it’s constantly rising and for long contests it would be almost impossible to stop that… From this contest I discovered that there are a variety of reasons to cheat and a lot of users seem to be more worried about getting ac over anything else, even if it’s not their own code.

Large number of cheating cases in a long contest may be due to the various forums where questions can be posted and answers received instantly. They may get a few extra AC’s but the joy of solving a problem on your own and getting the AC after loads of WA or TLE is irreplaceable. I guess the introduction of hacking solutions in short contests may help as cheaters will then be forced to come up with their own solutions(after thorough understanding) and “MAY JUST HOPEFULLY” propel them in the right direction and avoid cheating in long contests. This is just my opinion.

1 Like

No need for MOSS or other things, using a simple line checker program, http://ideone.com/jC4kBh , I checked the 4 solutions for CHAORNOT by same persons and voila, they came out same character by character means direct ctrl-a ctrl-c ctrl-v

http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2275416
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2275347
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2275372
http://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/2275401

And all 4 came 22 in India, which was not a bad achievement together!

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Post Deleted duplicate of a previous post!!!

i think u don’t understand…do u!!!

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and one of them is very passionate about programming .

I think he created a new handle to keep posting the same again and again :\