After the contest I was looking at some solutions of the challenge question in this july contest SEASOR. When I looked at one solution that had the same score as mine, I was shocked to see that it was my exact solution copied. I think there is some problem in my ideone account as I mark all of my codes as user. I don’t know how this happened. The following users have the exact solution as mine:
I think their rating points should be decreased or some other form of punishment should be given. mohit13 & ankit2014 solved MOU1H in JULY 13 LONG but couldn’t solve the relatively easier ones like KPRIME & CHRECT. This gives Codechef a bad reputation. I agree with bugkiller that we should stop using ideone for contests.
I used ideone for the first time and it did help . My code for MOU1H which was recursive was working fine on my machine for very large input . So to check why it is giving runtime error on codechef judge , I used ideone and it gave StackOverflow error . Then i wrote iterative version which ran perfectly on local machine , ideone and got accepted by Code Chef judge .
So one can’t argue the usefulness of ideone , since it is run by SPOJ which is the backend of Code Chef judge . It kind of helps to run your program there and see errors .
However you should note the follwing post in ideone FAQ’s
Visibility of a submission - what’s that?
Visibility determines how a submission is visible on ideone.com and who can access it. Possible values are:
public - everyone has access to the submission and it is visible on the recent page;
private - everyone has access to the submission and it is not listed on the recent page;
user's - only author has access to the submission and the submission is not listed on the recent page. To use this level of visibility you have to be logged in.
The "private" visibility option is quite misleading by its name .
Everyone who uses ideone for a submission should take care of this
It might also be useful to read other FAQ's :
http://ideone.com/faq
@sikander_nsit says his solution got copied even when marked with "user's" visibility option . I would appreciate if any one could tell me whether my solution was also copied by someone . Meanwhile to be able use "user's" visibility option you need to be logged in . @sikander_nsit , were you logged in ideone.com when you ran your solution at ideone ??
ideone also helps as you don’t have to manually type the sample cases…something like “custom test” as provided by ‘codeforces’ comes handy as it allows you to test your code and also prevents such instances of copied code…sadly no such thing is available here
