[JAN'15] Top contestants (msm1993 and kutengine) cheat again

@msm1993 and @kutengine are top notch programmers. People like them should not indulge in such activities.
Correction: Need not indulge in such activities. Banning then for few contests seems the right choice if they have cheated.

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Hi,

I have forwarded this to admins… Hopefully they will see it and take appropriate measures this time…

It’s unfair that you, @mugurelionut which seem to enjoy working hard for this problem specifically and from which submissions I can learn a lot, sees himself being undermined by teams or by people which lack ethics enough to prefer cheating over an honest contest…

I hope they will do anything this time :slight_smile:

Bruno

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Hello,
I also found some suspicious accounts.
random11111 | CodeChef User Profile for random | CodeChef,
yowa | CodeChef User Profile for yowa | CodeChef,
mrcoder | CodeChef User Profile for dgfhdf | CodeChef.
These guys only solve tough questions of long challenge.

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Let us apologise for this delayed response. The reason we could not act upon this earlier was mainly due to the ICPC onsite regional and the entire team here being busy with that. But that is no excuse. Also we had written to the participants in question and were waiting for them to respond.

We have verified and agree to every single point that mugurelionut has mentioned. And we thank mugurelionut for all the pains taken to do this. As an immediate step we are disqualifying their solutions form these contests and reducing their rating points (a standard procedure that we apply in any case of violation of our Code Of Conduct). We will also send them an email warning them about the same.

We are also considering reducing the submission limit to 200 per user. We will need a broader discussion on the same. Creating multiple accounts is against our Code of Conduct and if someone is doing so to make multiple submissions, we will want to know. It is not always possible to catch this in MOSS results, but we would act on every such reported case.

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mugurelionut’s words is unfair for @msm1993 and @kutengine. perhaps they have studied together with the same teachers since high school (both of them took part in IMO 2011). You shouldn’t accuse them of cheating, just because their ideas are similar to each other.

I am a fan of @mugurelionut… just this… hats off to your efforts…a true coder…!!

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Coding world is happy to have you @mugurelionut. :slight_smile:

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One thing is for sure, if you want to beat mugurel in Code chef Long, you better beat him fairly, else HE WILL FIND YOU & HE WILL KILL YOU (humor intended).

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That’s not a bad idea, in theory I can ban the user, but I’m not sure if such user is banned only in forum or also for a contest, someone wants to try (I can ban for a limited amount of time)?

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@betlista: What did you find suspicious about @yowa’s submissions?

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He had submissions only for the Challenge problem, so it might be used by people who required more submissions to optimize their solution.

When I saw it, it was during the contest, so I was not able to see the code. After the contest I didn’t investigate more, but it is as @sidgupta234 described above, I’m not telling definitely he is guilty, maybe just a big fan of challenge problems, he/she always solve only challenge problem (as I can see from his profile)…

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Some people do only the hard problems or the challenge problem in the long challenge.

@subhendu_sethi: I agree with you that @msm1993 and @kutengine are good programmers, but they seem to lack any kind of ethics. They are willing to do anything in order to get high ranks in the contest - and that includes cheating (repeatedly). It’s sad that Codechef admins allow such behavior to take place on their platform without doing anything about it.

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Right, one should be careful. For example, gennady.korotkevich - CodeChef User Profile with global rank 1 | CodeChef only played with the challenge problem in DEC14.

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Im not sure if I can do it myself… not sure if this is about karma or about those stars in front of your name, but, if I could I would!! this is unfair for @mugurelionut which I actually greatly admire for his awesome submissions and way of explaining things… :slight_smile: There are contests possibly better suited for teams or for someone with dubious ethical standards…

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I think the admin should take a strict action this time.

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For starters it is quite a known fact that Koreans compete in teams. Secondly in the previous competition they had basically the same solution for the challenge problem. No matter how closely you think you can’t have solution with that kind of similarity unless you are cheating. Thirdly if we assume that they had similar ideas in previous challenge then how did they have wildly different codes for same ideas in this contest unless they are trying to hide something ?

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@admin: I think reducing the submission limit to 200 is a good idea. At least it’s one more step towards less over-fitting of the solutions to the test data.

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@dzlla: I think it’s possible to have similar ideas (particularly if one discusses the problem with others), but not that similar. Moreover, I was also mentioning that they had identical parameters used for tuning their solutions, which they tried hard to hide (by encoding these parameters in different ways in the 2 submissions). I can explain to you why these parameters were very important in obtaining high scores for this problem, but there is not enough space in a single comment. I will try to write a separate answer about this or maybe write about it on the editorial page.

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