Should CodeChef increase the duration of the long Contest to 2 weeks?

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21

@bugkiller : You should have mailed the codechef during the contest. The user should definitely be banned for posting this on public forums like these.

22

I think this format is good. I feel the codechef has very very good testers Anton and Hiroto but I think the codechef should us (at least) two testers for each contest to minimize the contest end date and problem modifications.

3 Likes
23

@javadecoder >> And how would they know the user’s id here, on Codechef? And there is no way you can permanently stop this thing, so extending the contest duration will, yes, increase this scenario further more.

24

I would say 10 days is just perfect (or even too long).

3 Likes
25

My opinion is that 10 days is enough (I would get too tired for answering all these annoying comments “Why I have WA?”, “Why I have TLE?” during 14 days :P)

But encouraging the best submission for challenge excluding two winners seems very good idea. In this way we could really involve more contestants in solving this problem and not only those who solved almost all the problems.

What I think is that top 3 submissions for challenge problem excluding global top 10 and top 6 Indian submissions excluding Indian top 20 should also receive goodies as top 10 and top 20.

Now we could even have hundreds of contestants who simply will try only challenge problem :slight_smile:
Of course exact numbers could be discussed later.

7 Likes
26

@bugkiller I could find the user’s id in less than a minute (Google rocks) and know I agree even more that the duration time of long contests shouldn’t be extended in such extreme way. Well what’s the fun in getting points by cheating, I think codechef offers a great opportunity for self achievement and self learning . The contests are actually to test YOUR skills, I really hate people who do this, that might even take the credit away for those who came up with the solutions by themselves
 If one likes to compete this way one should search for team competitions

27

@junior94 >> How will you find the id of such a user if he/she is using different email ids for CC and for WWW minus CC? :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
28

We like the suggestion of running the contest from a Friday afternoon IST to Monday afternoon IST (gives most (not all) people in the world 2 weekends). We are seriously considering this.

29

Edit : Few more people have filled the form.

This is the response of 33 users on this form - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFZWVHNkZ3BPdUJjeTN5ZUNqYldiZkE6MQ

(Its less than 1% of total users, but majority coincides with my opinion :p)

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Users who have voted = {vinayak garg, n2n_, mukulgupta, karthsharma, anudeep2011, djdolls, iscsi, bela.mervado, javadecoder, Pranjal Gupta, ani94, punitsingh, pranjaljain92, abscon, ujjwal12, gaurav708, vivek_altruist, aj_1992, kuruma, ksh78, coolboy190, v1nay5on1, kuchumova_mary, anton_lunyov, junior94, hynekdav, archie004, Rubanenko, davisisac, sourabh912, phantom11, coderfrmhell, Betlista};

As you can see -

  1. Users are happy with 10 days long contest. In fact more people want to decrease days than increase it. But the 10 days should include 2 weekends.
  2. Most users don’t want locking of problems.
  3. People are equally divided over Challenge problem to have “Double points” or to stay with “Current format”. But I think Anton’s scheme is best.

Apart from this @mukulgupta’s idea for virtual contest is quite good.

4 Likes
30

Hello all,

I am also excited about virtual contests for the users, but how would this work exactly?

There are some things that need be thought about it, namely:

How would the virtual contest work? Would it be like the ones on Codeforces (where duration and rankings are simulated, as if it was a real contest), or as our Long Contests here last 10 days, we would do something different?

I think that it could be nice if people could create their own contests, with problems from practice section for example.

The format regarding the level of difficulty of all problems could be taken into account and the person would be able to choose problems from all 4 sections (Easy, Medium, Hard and Challenge) and create an individual contest where real practice could be done :smiley:

Maybe we could also implement some sort of virtual ranking, that would indicate the ranking that the person attains on the virtual contests only!!

I think it could be a good idea :smiley:

Best regards,

Bruno

1 Like
31
  1. He’s the only user with that name here in codechef;
  2. He solved the problem one day after he asked that question;

Well, @bugkiller I could be wrong and this might be a big coincidence right?

32

Oh no! March 1 is Friday. So March long contest will start as usual. I was hoping that I will have more time on testing it, especially considering that February is a short month :frowning:

1 Like
33

1 and 2 are perfect :slight_smile: Good work Admins!

34

I agree with the suggestion of m1sterzer0 that the long contest should be a 10 day contest starting on the first Friday of the month. However, besides this what I feel is that the Submission Run Log should be made public to the users after the contest so that they can see into the test cases and easily find the bugs in their submitted codes, before switching on to the editorials. This will definitely fetch the editorial writers some time to formulate the editorials.

Also, any programmer always want to get his own code accepted before switching on to some other users code if he has formulated the algorithm. This will help him find his implementation mistakes and write bug-free code in the future.

This will also reduce the various blog posts, in which a frustrated participant is compelled to ask the other users about the bugs in his code when he gets a Wrong answer or Runtime error. We all know sometimes how difficult it is to understand some other user’s code submitted during a long contest.

Lastly, this Submission Run Log concept will also benefit the users during practice sessions as it will help them to recognize their mistakes in a much faster way, and solve larger set of practice problems.

3 Likes
35

Note that “CodeChef uses SPOJ © by Sphere Research Labs”.
It seems like SPOJ don’t have such convenient possibility to see on what test case you solution is wrong. So the only possible way would be to release the test data after the contest. So that user could figure it out his mistake by comparison of outputs on his local machine. But AFAIK admins several times reject such request of contestants. So unlikely this time someone decide to agree with this point.

1 Like
36

I see one of the reasons to not release the test data is to avoid copying of codechef problems to other online judges and also not let someone else use problems in some prohibited way.

So from this point of view it seems reasonable to not release the test data.

37

I understand your point that as CodeChef uses SPOJ for running its system tests its not feasible to release the Run Log but I feel that some alternative way should be developed to provide the user with the test cases due to which the user’s solution failed the system tests. Many a times the user is unable to figure out the bug in his code even after looking at other person’s accepted solution, which sometimes leads to leaving the problem unsolved.

38

Websites like Topcoder and Codeforces also provide the user with the System Run Log. So I don’t get your point that the problems being copied or used in some prohibited way. Besides that, many of the problem statements in the CodeChef practice problem set have been copied from spoj.pl, so it should not be an issue when some other online judge copies CodeChef problems.

39

Let admins answer this. I actually don’t remember what is the reason for not publishing test cases. I now see that my reason with copying problems does not make any sense.

40

AFAIR it is opposite to your logic. Having test data it is too easy to find the bug and this will make worse ability of the contestant to find bugs by themselves.

Note that when you work at some company nobody will provide you with test cases where your program fails. So providing test data here could be disservice.

If you have correct solution you could always try to run stress-test to find the test where your solution gives wrong result. If running this on random tests does not help then you should come up with better test generation plan. This is very helpful ability.

4 Likes