Thank you Codechef for the unbalanced contest, I know this doesn’t matter for you but it does for the ones who worked hard for this particular day
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I’m not here to rant but I thought I’d share our experience yesterday.
We started off with trying to solve the reduction game question first because the statement was small. We were following some greedy approach using priority queues and it failed twice. It tilted us a lot. Then we checked the number of submissions and found that the robot question got a lot of submissions and tried that. But unfortunately due to a small mistake(indexing errors) we got that wrong for the first time. At this point we were in full tilt mode. We coded it again and got AC.(This whole thing took literally 10 minutes from reading the question to WA to AC). But at this point, it was too late. There were many submissions for the first one and we even had a wrong submission. We couldn’t solve the second question and lost it.
There were 5 questions. There should have been a gradient of like ~200 to 300 submissions per question right? Only then the teams can get filtered properly. I understand that we don’t deserve to qualify if we don’t solve the second question but there were a lot of teams who qualified after solving only the 1st question.
There were teams who didn’t qualify even after solving the second question.
Now that doesn’t seem balanced does it?
There’s nothing we can do now. I hope they take this as a lesson and make more balanced contests in future. At least increase the number of questions. It wouldn’t hurt to add two more questions right?
Even Codeforces div3 are more balanced than this one.
I think it would have been better if this online round was held on typingtest.com
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If you can’t even solve the second question then you should introspect whether you are worthy of going to the regionals or even World finals. and this isnt a Long challenge, Speed test or not the first question is always made such… My opinion xD
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Is anyone aware when will the final results be announced?
Or even the approximate dates would do.
Codechef showed us the reason why India with such huge population of coders fails to perform well at the World Finals.
Note : I am not saying that our team was deserving but many deserving team might have suffered due to this .
Edit: But we learnt a lot of things from this contest .I see a lot of people blaming the 1st question but I do not think that’s right . Blaming the question setter is also not right because it is very hard to set a balanced questions.
I am disheartened because might be I am not worthy enough to be in Regionals but my team-mates are,and also many other teams which are deserving .
Hoping for a better question set in Snackdown
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Calm down Mate…! I partly agree with you on the problem setting…! But you cannot blame the selection procedure… The main aim of ACM ICPC & CodeChef(As a platform for competitive coding) is to indulge & bring more and more people in this field… Anyways, most of the teams that solved just the one problem & qualified will realize the difference at the regional rounds!
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Is the ranklist on the contest page final ?
WHAT ABOUT THIS TEST CASE??
…3…3…
IF BOTH OF THEM ARE GIVEN DIRECTION RIGHT,THEN IT WILL BE SAFE AND STARTED TOGETHER…BUT MOST OF THE CODE WOULD MAKE IT UNSAFE
This guy is accusing the problem setter and abusing the winners!!!on an open forum!!!Where is the admin now??Why is he silent?Is this language acceptable in this community?
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Ya that’s correct that problemset was not balanced at all
But the most sad part is my team solved 2 problems and then also we will not be able to qualify
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It’s already almost two weeks and there is no announcement about the results from any of the regionals. Why acm icpc being such a huge contest and there is not at all any information from the source.
we almost solved 2nd just missed out a corner case.
i am waiting for 3rd nov pre elimination to see what they do.i will do good in that.once i used to do pretty good in codechefchallenges.They took my 1950 rating from my previous account without listening to me.
and see there are almost 1000 slots for regionals in india,ask the remaining teams the same question “are they deserving?”.
thanks for your advice/concern/comment.
proved myself not a robot just to see ranklist.what bullshit website
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I am also waiting for Snackdown pre-elimination round. 
And no matter what you say, Codechef admins won’t do anything regarding this ACM-ICPC, or maybe they really can’t do anything.
And about rating, one of my friend too suffered from it. He even mailed to them and all they said was that they can’t do anything now.
Even the teams qualifying feel more pity for those who they thought otherwise would. Anyways what’s gone is begone. ACM India needs to learn to have a good problemset from next time.
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just a small bug in 2nd implementation.started with 3rd early in the contest but left after some feedback
hmmm you are absolutely right.i think codeforces or kattis servers are good option for icpc online rounds,just cut the chef out
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completely agreed with you guys! really sad but will try next time (my last one)!
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like the singapore icpc round held on kattis some days back
MY true feelings!