After the current change in the judge for the DARTS challenge problem from the June 2014 long contest, the judge is more broken than before.
As far as I understood, the initial version of the judge was returning the values of M and S in the wrong order when throwing darts for practice, but it was returning them in the right order when throwing the 99999 darts (which means that all the scores of all the solutions before the rejudge were correct scores).
However, the new version gives TLE to any solution which throws at least 1 dart for training. I tested this with a very simple solution which gets Correct Answer when it throws 0 darts for training and gets TLE when it throws 1 dart for training (even if the result of that dart is not used later on). As a result, all my top scoring solutions got TLE after the rejudge (and any other solution that I try to submit gets TLE, too, if it throws >= 1 darts for training).
To me this is unacceptable. There are less than 2 days left of the June 2014 long contest and the judge for the challenge problem is behaving incorrectly. I posted a comment about this on the problem’s page many hours ago, but the comment did not appear there, yet (I guess it was not approved by the admins?). I also sent an email to [email protected]. The only option left is to open a discussion about it (which is what I am doing with this post).
I believe that all the solutions which currently have Correct Answer for this problem are throwing 0 darts for training. I have no problem devising a solution which does not throw darts for training, but this is not what the problem statement suggests.
@admin, @iscsi: Please fix the issues with the judge ASAP. It greatly affects the quality of the contest.
@all: If you are encountering the same issues that I mentioned, then please mention it as a comment/answer to this post. If you were able to get Correct Answer with a solution which throws at least 1 dart for training (although I believe this is currently impossible), then please mention that, too.
Later edit: It seems that they found the bug in the judge and that there will be a new rejudge. I also verified that solutions can now get Correct Answer while also throwing darts for training.