Should CodeChef increase the duration of the long Contest to 2 weeks?

I believe that a 14-day contest would be better because of containing 2 week-ends for everyone. Of course, there will still be people with more time to devote to the contest and others with less time for it, no matter how long the contest will be.

However, extra days added to the contest (because of problems added late or updates in the test data or judging programs) could spoil the whole idea.

Apart from that, I think the contest is fine as it is now (extra prizes for the challenge problem won’t hurt :slight_smile: but I don’t think locking problems is the way to go).

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I think 10 days is a perfectly fine length for the contest and don’t think it should be increased to 14 or 15.

There will never be any length of contest which allows everyone to participate for exactly the same amount of time. Time zones aren’t so far apart that some people are more advantaged than others in terms of how many weekends they have during that period! The only differences may be a few hours on either end, which a 14 or 15 day contest isn’t going to change at all, as days near the start or end of a contest could be considered more important.

The recent contests which have been delayed by a few days have really felt a bit too long. (And that’s despite me actually solving the hardest problem in that delay period.) Those people who need more time can happily continue solving them in the practice room. I could point you to about a million comments by people asking why their code is wrong as knowing so would help them learn - being able to access editorials and correct solutions after the contest has ended provides a means to do this, so stretching out the contest isn’t really advantageous to them.

As for the challenge problems - personally, I’ve never enjoyed them as much as problems where there is a definitive yes/no answer - that, combined with the fact that I know I have absolutely no hope of reaching the top 2, usually means I don’t even attempt them.

I don’t believe attaching a prize to the top challenge score is going to accomplish much though, as we all know who will win that :slight_smile: Since the top 2 already have prizes, perhaps some prizes could be randomly allocated - eg, chosen at random from the top 10 or 20 challenge scores, not including the top 2 globally. That would definitely be an incentive for people to work on the challenge problem. (As would changing the prizes back from top 2 only to be spread out amongst more people, like they used to in the beginning.)

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Finally I’ll get two weekends to solve the problems :slight_smile: Its quite difficult to manage being in office for the whole day and then coming back and solving the problems. Now I can devote two sat-sun for codechef :slight_smile:

It will help high-skilled coder,in case he is missing some concept to solve problems.
But it will not help low-skilled or beginners as problem level is too high (except 2/3 question) for them. It does not matter how much time code-chef are going to give,they got frustrated after struggling for 7-8 hours for a single question (except the two problems that got highest AC). and for them contest got over after solving two problems. So its better to give 50% problems keeping in mind the level for beginners .

@admin I haven’t been around here very long – this was my first contest here (ironically I entered to force myself to become a better python programmer, but I often ended up abandoning Python for C++ for speed, but I digress…). I can say that I appreciated having 2 weekends to work the problems this time, as the weekdays get eaten up with work for my job and family time. That said, I also agree that more than 10-11 days feels a bit too long.

It seems that your choices are:

  • Leave it as is (perhaps with the extra recognition for the challenge problem)
  • Always run the contest from a Friday afternoon IST to Monday afternoon IST (gives most people in the world 2 weekends)
  • Run it for two weeks as suggested (which makes the contest a bit too long)

As for me, I would probably selfishly vote for the middle alternative, but if that is impossible, I would probably just leave it as is.

P.S.: We need pypy support on SPOJ to make Python more competitive. If anyone has a suggestion on who I should try to influence here, I’ll take any suggestions.

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Codechef has been a wonderful platform and I owe it a lot for whatever I have gained from it. However, I am not completely convinced with the above suggestions.
I’d like to stick with the present format and I reiterate triplem’s viewpoint.

  1. Firstly, no matter, how many days the contest gets extended, we will never be able to ensure everyone gets an equal time. I, for instance, being the lazy person that I am, keep on delaying my submissions till the end of contest is near.
  2. Secondly, I believe, due to the format, it is inevitable to fully prevent discussions of live contest problems among peers, and on other online platforms like stackoverflow, etc. Extending the contest will only add to more frustration leading to more of such behavior. There are multiple instances of comments being posted by people to find out why their solution was wrong/slow. Often, the slightest hint converts a WA/TLE to AC. By extending the contest, the access to editorials is delayed and that doesn’t really help them.
  3. I agree with the 3rd point of adding some incentive to try and solve the challenge problem as it requires a different skill-set. It will surely bring in more solutions for the challenge problem.

Apart from the suggestions already discussed, I’d love if codechef allows its users to conduct virtual contests (without hassles) so that the problems which they couldn’t solve during the long/short contest and other archive problems could be clubbed in and practiced in a contest-environment.

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My opinion is that 10 days is enough (I would get too tired for answering all these annoying comments “Why I have WA?”, “Why I have TLE?” during 14 days :P)

But encouraging the best submission for challenge excluding two winners seems very good idea. In this way we could really involve more contestants in solving this problem and not only those who solved almost all the problems.

What I think is that top 3 submissions for challenge problem excluding global top 10 and top 6 Indian submissions excluding Indian top 20 should also receive goodies as top 10 and top 20.

Now we could even have hundreds of contestants who simply will try only challenge problem :slight_smile:
Of course exact numbers could be discussed later.

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Edit : Few more people have filled the form.

This is the response of 33 users on this form - Codechef Long Contest Format

(Its less than 1% of total users, but majority coincides with my opinion :p)

Users who have voted = {vinayak garg, n2n_, mukulgupta, karthsharma, anudeep2011, djdolls, iscsi, bela.mervado, javadecoder, Pranjal Gupta, ani94, punitsingh, pranjaljain92, abscon, ujjwal12, gaurav708, vivek_altruist, aj_1992, kuruma, ksh78, coolboy190, v1nay5on1, kuchumova_mary, anton_lunyov, junior94, hynekdav, archie004, Rubanenko, davisisac, sourabh912, phantom11, coderfrmhell, Betlista};

As you can see -

  1. Users are happy with 10 days long contest. In fact more people want to decrease days than increase it. But the 10 days should include 2 weekends.
  2. Most users don’t want locking of problems.
  3. People are equally divided over Challenge problem to have “Double points” or to stay with “Current format”. But I think Anton’s scheme is best.

Apart from this @mukulgupta’s idea for virtual contest is quite good.

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Hello all,

I am also excited about virtual contests for the users, but how would this work exactly?

There are some things that need be thought about it, namely:

How would the virtual contest work? Would it be like the ones on Codeforces (where duration and rankings are simulated, as if it was a real contest), or as our Long Contests here last 10 days, we would do something different?

I think that it could be nice if people could create their own contests, with problems from practice section for example.

The format regarding the level of difficulty of all problems could be taken into account and the person would be able to choose problems from all 4 sections (Easy, Medium, Hard and Challenge) and create an individual contest where real practice could be done :smiley:

Maybe we could also implement some sort of virtual ranking, that would indicate the ranking that the person attains on the virtual contests only!!

I think it could be a good idea :smiley:

Best regards,

Bruno

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I agree with the suggestion of m1sterzer0 that the long contest should be a 10 day contest starting on the first Friday of the month. However, besides this what I feel is that the Submission Run Log should be made public to the users after the contest so that they can see into the test cases and easily find the bugs in their submitted codes, before switching on to the editorials. This will definitely fetch the editorial writers some time to formulate the editorials.

Also, any programmer always want to get his own code accepted before switching on to some other users code if he has formulated the algorithm. This will help him find his implementation mistakes and write bug-free code in the future.

This will also reduce the various blog posts, in which a frustrated participant is compelled to ask the other users about the bugs in his code when he gets a Wrong answer or Runtime error. We all know sometimes how difficult it is to understand some other user’s code submitted during a long contest.

Lastly, this Submission Run Log concept will also benefit the users during practice sessions as it will help them to recognize their mistakes in a much faster way, and solve larger set of practice problems.

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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

Just my 2 cents:

  • 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).

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Locking 9 problems 3 days before the end gives the same issue again! If 2 of those last 3 days are weekend(holidays) in one country and not in other!

not 500-600 its 1700-1800 lines :slight_smile: I am a beginner. Seeing BIG solution makes me ignore the solutions :slight_smile: ACRush also used to come 2nd,3rd 4th a few years ago but now he has practiced so much…he’s better than others…
FACT : I support that I am also not able to grasp completely many ideas of top solution.Increasing the number of days would surely help me out.

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Well, but by increasing number of days, all you would gain would be more headaches… Because one thing I believe in algorithm contests is that having the right idea is key… Without it, you won’t go far, even if contest was 20 or 30 days… You (and I ofc, I’d say Im at medium/beginner level) would gain more if editorials could be discussed with setters themselves on a larger time window.

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Please cast your votes on above 3 points. Also ask fellow Codechefers to do the same. I will post the results once decent number of responses get recorded. Note - This is not official form

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I completely agree on the “discussing live contest problems” part. Here is an example where the easiest problem was being discussed: combinatorics - Counting the number of ordered triples - Mathematics Stack Exchange

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@bugkiller : You should have mailed the codechef during the contest. The user should definitely be banned for posting this on public forums like these.

I think this format is good. I feel the codechef has very very good testers Anton and Hiroto but I think the codechef should us (at least) two testers for each contest to minimize the contest end date and problem modifications.

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@javadecoder >> And how would they know the user’s id here, on Codechef? And there is no way you can permanently stop this thing, so extending the contest duration will, yes, increase this scenario further more.