ICPC 2017 Results - But Why?

How does that make someone a “good programmer” ? I am baffled by this point of view of yours, @shashank96

@utkalsinha - Though I do agree your notion about ICPC Reservation helping the society to become better as a whole, denying incentives for the ones who are actually work hard can have a very hard-hitting negative impact in the long run.

My implication was someone who knows how to code and program to certain extent can easily fool any fool plagiarism detector. As we know there isn’t any program which can check the logic of the code. I didn’t imply that any programmer who can cheat is a good. It was a mere assertion of someone’s capability of understanding a code and refactoring it to avoid plagiarism detection rather than categorising.

Among all the pertaining issues , I believe the organizers at Gwalior site decided to keep a more sensible and fair criteria for selecting teams for the Onsite Round.

Edit: Of course one may argue for the fairness of this criteria as well, but compared to what happened in Kanpur and Amritapuri, this is much fairer.

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This seems good !

My suggestion here can be , instead of each region selecting top team from each college, the top team (in the online round)from every college gets seat in whichever region they applied for, and the rest of the seats are allocated merit wise. This way there will be diversity as well as more seats available for teams who performed better but could not achieve top rank in college.

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I don’t want diversity, its the aim of ACM ICPC. Even I could’nt get selected though our rank was 172.

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I understand that they want to promote icpc and that it is an inter-college competition and all. But why do they need to apply this rule to EACH Indian regional. They could just make 1 team compulsory per college for the entire country and the other seats can be given merit wise. That way 270/500 would be reserved but the rest of the seats will be merit wise.

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May be they want teams of world finals level and after that next 500-600 different colleges to spread awareness about coding in India, so that they will produce quality coders after 10-15 years across all over India. By the way my team iota_decoded (rank around 140), also won’t be going to regional this year too :).

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I would like to suggest a slight correction, it’s not just 240 unique colleges that fill the initially decided 250 slots but to accommodate all the teams solving 1 question the seats were increased so that all 269 unique colleges get a chance to compete. Similarly Kolkata/Kanpur increased their seats to 168 instead of initial 160 to accommodate all single solvers, preference being given to single solvers over the teams solving 5 questions. This has been happening for last many years however this time due to reduction of seats from amrita meritorious teams which could have attended one regional in other years on similar ranks got robbed of the chances.

Secondly why is the onus of increasing awareness only undertaken by amrita and kolkata ? Gwalior and Chennai had their own criterion of reserving some seats for meritorious teams(I fervently support this). Again concealing the rules right till the end forced some teams like ours to jeopardize our chances by going for the regionals which had most seats (Amrita and Kolkata). We were pretty sure of not coming first from any site in our college hence went for the sites with most seats.

We did fairly well in the online round coming 73 in the contest and finishing 3rd in our college. Top two teams from our college very deservingly are going to their respective regionals. Three teams from our college below us due to not filling Kolkata and Amrita are also going regionals. We aren’t.

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I think Gwalior’s algorithm only seems fair because they had less slots. Because of that less teams filled it and they didn’t have to face the scenario where a team has solved 4 questions and is 3rd rank in their college. This algorithm wont work with other sites.

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Thats really saddest story mate since two above you and even three below you made it to next round. I agree that they should(and must) make the Selection rules clear before hand since we should be knowing what we are signing up for !
And like chennai went for 90-30 rule ! Amritapuri should have atleast gone with 200-50 rule !

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Firstly, Gwalior had atleast 160 distinct institutions (which completed registration ofc) and from which at least 1 problem was solved (I checked myself). It isn’t less, considering Kanpur had about 170 and it also had more slots. So that point of yours doesn’t make sense.

I like to believe they would have given 3rd ranked teams a chance if they had more seats. I think they tried to maximize number of unique participating colleges (ICPC spirit or whatever) while respecting the merit criteria, to some extent.

I called it (relatively fair) for 2 reasons:

  1. They didn’t blindly select top ranked teams from every college. They set a bar (3 questions initially, then 2 for leftover problems). So this means 1 point alone won’t get you a seat.
  2. This gave second ranked teams in an institution, with a respectable score (4 or more) a chance to get qualified.

I saw Chennai’s selection criteria, and it’s equally fair.

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My team ‘Sharingan’ didn’t qualify for the second round …we had solved two questions and we were the rank 1 team from Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology…instead a team named ‘ApplesndOranges’ was selected which was second from our college and had solved only 1 question…plz provide proper justification or reevaluate the list

Lesson learnt.
Do not apply to Amritapuri next year :slight_smile:

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Lmao…XD

We can whine all about the shit system…it is shit…
but so is the education system in India…and so is every damn system in India.
Yet we have been living through this.

One thing i have learnt is, whining about the system will only waste your time.

Just.Accept.It.

Nothing is going to change for a long time.Welcome to India.

Want to go to regionals??

Here are a few tips.

  1. Do not apply for amritapuri.

or 2)Leave the country.

or 3)join a shit college.

or 4)Be the best in your college no matter how shit the contest is.

Plain and simple.

If someone from your college did it, it is because it was possible.Accept it.

PS:my team ranked Top 50 in online round, not selected for amritapuri. :slight_smile:

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Unfair selection criteria + 200 Regional seats reduced is the main cause of all this for the Amritapuri site. Something similar happened at Kanpur (selection of top ranked team from every college).

We had lost our hopes too (top 50 in the Online round, same as you) since in one site we were 3rd, and in the other site we were 2nd. We were equally surprised (and happy) that Gwalior decided to go with a better criteria. Even if we hadn’t made it there, I would have been still happy since they didn’t select all the one pointers who were supposedly the top ranked teams of their respective college.

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I feel this problem wouldn’t have arised if all sites had declared their selection criteria beforehand.

ICPC is not a very good tournament because it doesn’t promote fair competition (good teams always lose out).

Sadly, I also don’t know of any team contest ‘bigger’ than this (probably because there isn’t any other). Team contests are fun too :confused: