i completely agree with @rohan_bose95. formula based problems are not suited for contest where you have full access to internet & other resources. The problem with this is , no matter how difficult the problem is , once the formula is figured out , it travels through online portals like wildfire. if at the end of contest more than 3/4 teams(including selected ones) are unhappy then it means that something was really wrong with the contest.
One other side benifit would be that the submission queue will be not be that long as compared to questions with single line answers.I am just putting my viewpoint. I may be wrong.
Thoughts about ICPC 2017 Online Round.
Plausible Solution
Every college has access to internet.
Can it be done that each team is assigned a mentor from the college and the team is asked to take the ICPC Online Contest from the college itself. Thus the mentor will assure that they do not take discuss codes with other people during the contest ( It can happen that a contestant takes help from his friend/relative and get a AC thereby ensuring that a deserving team is not able to make it to the regionals ) or post these ask questions on StackExchange or other websites.
This will definitely ensure fair play for everyone.
@admin , @vijju123 , @akshayvenkat97
Have a look at this.
What if the mentor itself helps in corruption? After all, everyone has his own favorites who he wants to win. There are some other issues also in implementation, but I still value the opinion. Your direction is correct, I like that you gave a good thought over the suggestion
There were 5 problems in this year’s preliminary round. 4 out of these 5 were brute force problems i.e they could be solved with mere logic and required no use of any data structure or algorithms. We have no control over the level or type of questions for such contests, however, Codechef has not been able to conduct the contest smoothly since the past 3 years atleast and also there is no definite pattern about the number of questions or the time allotment over the years. Their online judge had a problem for the second question giving Internal error to some of the teams even if their solution was right.Now, Codechef, here is a fun fact , you cannot makeup for that by providing extra time because until the problem was rejudged the teams were thinking that their logic was incorrect which gave other teams the edge who were able to submit the problem in a single go. You cannot makeup for your mistake in a time and accuracy based contest by providing extra time.Moreover , the extra time was provided to all the teams irrespective of the fact whether they faced this problem or not. Also, when hosting a contest on such big platform , you expect the solutions not to be public until the contest is over but the solution for 2nd and 3rd problems were available on math.stackexchange during the contest. Also, I am not being able to digest their rules that the top team from each college will reach the regionals whether or not they perform worthwhile. Why do you have a problem if some colleges have greater number of teams performing well that you restrict the number of teams from a single college in any regional to 10. This means if a team from college X has a rank 120 but is 11th in its college , it does not qualify for the regionals unlike a team from college Y which has a rank say 1200 but is ranked 1st in its college which will qualify.
@guitarlover your solution will not make any difference. I agree with @vijju123 . A cheater is a cheater, he can send the login credentials to his relative/friend and get AC thereby beating a deserving team by unfair means. In an unproctured environment, there is no solution which can ensure that nobody cheats. Obviously this is really sad and wrong, but till now, there is no solution to this. Anyway cheating teams will be useless in the regionals they won’t go to the finals for sure
How is it fair for a Russian/Chinese team to not qualify for the World Finals, when they are muchhhhhh better than an hypothetical Indian team that managed to qualify for the WF? The region-wise slots are always going to be there in the World finals, and obviously the college-wise slots are present for the regionals! After all, the spirit of ICPC is to spread the idea of competitive programming to as many universities as possible.