Are we really competing against someone in 'CodeArena' of Hackerearth?

[sarthakmanna]

I’ve recently started participating in the ‘CodeArena’ 1-to-1 fight. However, not a single opponent has ever managed to submit even a partially correct solution in any of the fights I’ve participated in.

Some days ago, while ‘fighting’, I saw my opponent compiling his code and then submitting it only to get a WA in all the test cases. The problem was far too easy to get a WA. I tried to locate his submission after the fight, but couldn’t find it.

My suspicion increased when I looked into their profiles. All of them “hasn’t added any details yet.” Each profile name has the syntax: <first_name><last_name>, sometimes followed by another and/or a random number.

Eg. Yesterday, I fought against someone called Niranjan Kumar (https://www.hackerearth.com/@niranjan.kumar1). Problem was Choosing the Judges; a standard DP problem. My opponent compiled his code, then submitted, and obviously got a WA.

After contest ends, I find the problem, view the “All submissions” page and… Wow, my opponent is non-existent.

I admit I am new in Hackerearth, and I must not bluntly accuse someone; but am I really missing anything?

[sorb1997]

I can not tell if every account is legit but I remember losing to an opponent once, I just missed some minor edge case and got WA in a few test cases, so after the arena fight ended I had a one-one to conversation with the opponent in inbox about what I missed.

Here is a screenshot of the conversation(I have hidden the name of the sender for obvious reason)

![alt text][1]

But then again this is just one case, I too have my suspicions for the exact same reason, of the matches I have played I lost only one of them and rest were either wins or draws(and this is considering that I am bad at Competitive Programming, so there is no way I could have won most of them). So, are those accounts legit or just some bots playing around? I don’t know but hope someone can put better insight.
[1]: https://discuss.codechef.com/upfiles/Screenshot_from_2018-06-19_15-18-55.png

[rounak217]

I think there are some bots competing against us. I just looked into my fight history on CodeArena. I have had 9 fights till now and 6 of the opponents have their name as per the syntax you described. Also, I looked into the submissions on the problem page and their submissions weren’t there. Also, none of them has a profile picture and they haven’t submitted a single solution yet according to their profile. I have won 5 fights and all of them are against 5 opponents out of these 6. The fight against the remaining 1 out of these 6 was a timed out. For the rest 3 opponents, they have at least some information on their profile and their submissions even show up on the problem page. Also, none of those 6 opponents is following anyone but 4 of them have some real followers. Strange!

[amulyagaur111]

I recently fought with someone. When i tried to check their profile , this is what i saw.

[souradeep1999]

yeah,i also noticed that today

[sarthakmanna]

18 fights, and I still haven’t encountered a single coder, whose username doesn’t follow the syntax…

[sarthakmanna]

Hey, wait… There should be an ‘@’ before ‘mukul.chandra’

[sarthakmanna]

Still, no details filled…

[l_returns]

yeah I have same doubt as I never lose any match on code arena

[vivek_1998299]

Most of the time its bot,but we do get real coders sometimes(i got hemant once(obviously lost to him ))

[sarthakmanna]

Wow, so even getting paired with a human opponent depends on luck !!!

[imaster]

I can explain to you why so many of these people have <first>.<last>[integer] as their name. When I created my account on HackerEarth, I signed up with Google account. Apparently it automagically generates your name based on your Gmail account so mine also ended up in that format, and I didn’t bother looking to change it.

[nagpaljatin141]

We do compete against someone many a times, cause I’ve competed against my roommate several times, a thing we do by simultaneously pressing fight button

[poor_codr]

Hey @sarthakmanna, I have been practicing problems on Hackerearth for the past few months and have had some one to one fights at the Code-Arena platform you are concerned about.

Me and a friend of mine managed to fight in the same game by searching opponents at the same time. So, all I can say is that the platform allows users to compete against each other for sure but I don’t know whether there can be a possibility of a virtual fight only.

[sapo96]

Can I see the other person’s/bot’s solution after the challenge is over? I didn’t see any such option there.

[lafeo_007]

Alright I am new to this competitive coding too, I don’t seem to understand how one should present the test cases, my method gives the right output but the during submission it says that the output doesn’t match even though when I try compiling it in my local IDE it works.
Is there some way to code the output so that the judge can understand it? please tell me i have been getting correct answers but it ends up not being understood??

[atharva3899]

Hey, I am reading this post after long time it was posted. But I was just curious about it. @sarthakmanna I also fought against Niranjan Kumar

and @amulyagaur111 I also fought with mukul.chandra

so I think there are bots playing. Though I lost to one person, so there are some human players also.

[shubhamskk]

Some times , even after passing all the testcases, you lose because score doesnt add . Hackerearth sucks.