I am saying to provide with the test cases after the contest gets over. During the contest, the participant always tries his level best to find the bug in his code and after the contest he expects that he will come to know about his mistake.
I understand in a company environment nobody will provide me with the test cases, but the contest getting over is similar to exceeding the time limit of finding the bug in my code, while someone else has already checked-in a bug free code. So, before moving to his solution I would like to find the bug in my solution, here the test data would help me.
@anton_lunyov When you work at some company, you won’t even know whether your solution is correct, so perhaps CodeChef should not tell contestants the result until after the contest. On the other hand, when you work at some company, you can discuss the problem with your peers, ask on forums etc.
My point is that coding competitions don’t (and shouldn’t) simulate a work environment, and therefore such an argument is inapplicable to them. What should be considered is whether a particular aspect encourages or discourages learning and improvement.
“What should be considered is whether a particular aspect encourages or discourages learning and improvement.”
If this is the point to adress, then the answer is simple:
Showing test cases to the contestant can make his/her job easier, as by not showing wrong test cases, it forces the contestant to think on corner cases and analyzing code which is a great skill to have either as a recreative coder or working for a company.
Specifically about releasing test data, I think there are cases both ways. For weaker coders, perhaps, having to think carefully about their code, come up with their own tests, could be beneficial. For stronger coders, who already do this as a matter of habit, I think it’s not very productive.
I consider myself to be a relatively good coder (nowhere near the top, though). Having spent several hours debugging DIVPRO because I consider 0 to be a 1-digit number definitely did not help me become better at anything. That is probably a case where having access to the data would have been better.
@archie004 I feel like it is better to convert your answer to question and all our comments as answers so that this discussion could be continued having more space for answers and probably it will involve more people
Hm… It seems that the best way would be to move this answer and comments to the thread mentioned by @mukulgupta. But it seems we have no such functionality. So I left all as it is.
In my opinion, Increasing to Two weeks will make the contest boring. If you want it to make a multiple of 7 IMHO it is better to make it 7 with 7 problems or so
idea about 2 weeks long contest is quite good, at least I’d like to have 2 weekends for solving those interesting problems (and as described not in all countries weekend is saturday and sunday)
From my point of view I’m not interested in pypy, or virtual contests, prizes for challenge problems or two tester (my opinion is that it works well with one tester).
On the other hand I’m against reserving some time for challenge problems - I really like those, but it’s a strategy which problem you would like to solve (except ACRush, that solves all of them :-D).
There is missing one possibility in “How many days should a Long contest run?” My opinion is the better format would be start on Saturday and end next Sunday (9 days are ok, but I’d like to have two weekends).
I find great we are improving CodeChef’s functionality as a community!! This is another important discussion topic!
