Some users cheats in every contest. I don’t know how they do that . But it affects most of users rank.
codechef should handle strictly with these guys.
I opened their profiles and found that they also have the same solutions for DRGHTS and LMATRIX2. And the best part is they have also cheated for REMISS and KINGSHIP in February Cook Off. All their solutions have been same for all the problems i opened so far.
Found these by just looking at 1 page of AC submissions!! Just wonder how many more cheaters are hiding in the remaining 12 pages!!
Cheaters are cheaters, but those who are claiming that their solutions are genuinely written by themselves. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t have an IDE or a text editor and a compiler. If you are solving 9 problems out of 10 and you don’t have something to test your code locally then its a shame! Don’t come up with lame excuses now.
Some users copied a code from ideone, put their name/handle etc details on the top of the code as comment and submit it. (CodeChef: Practical coding for everyone as mentioned in an answer on this page itself) Sorry buddies that’s not how you’ll show that you own that code! Get a life.
I don’t know how much action is actually taken against cheaters. Rating updates are delayed sometimes and it’s claimed to be because of removing cheaters, but we see almost identical codes even long after contests. There was a case when a post mentioned 2 cheaters, and several weeks later, it mentioned that no action had been taken against them. Wat?
The first thing to do is unification of rules. A lot is only mentioned in FAQ or Code of Conduct posts, but who’d read that… in fact, who’d read the rules in the problems’ page? I know that well: we’re lazy and don’t want to read boring stuff like that. Nevertheless, it should be all unified. And the rules against cheaters should be especially pointed out among these.
This opens one more possibility: strong punishments. FB Hacker Cup disqualified someone for posting anything about the problems in comments. It was nothing big, but he broke the rules and was disqualified. In this case, just one disqualification is weak: temporary/permanent ban. Or IP ban, or subnet ban (which is not a good idea, though :D). Something that’d teach people that if they cheat once, they won’t be given a chance to do so again for a long time.
Most importantly, the submit needs a bot which’d scan any submitted/accepted (pick one) solution against other ones (during/after the contest, pick one again) and if it detects excessive similarity, report (or outright disqualify/ban) the user in question. It doesn’t seem that hard to do.
Also, it’d be good to publish a list of proved cheaters for every contest. Something like a Hall of Shame.
Although with the way things have been going (or standing), I doubt Codechef will ever give any regard to these ideas.
EDIT: This is off-topic, but it’s also a change that should be made. Comments should give karma if upvoted. Maybe less than answers, but still, they should give karma. Sometimes a comment is much more useful than an answer.
The above solutions are exact copies of my submissions, How have they obtained my solutions and is there any way to prevent it?
link to my submissions- CodeChef: Practical coding for everyone
you can check for my previous submission where i made the mistake of initialising the gloval array for caching the results as 0 where it sholud be -1 i di used ideone before submitting so they may have infiltrated my solution
@vishalkarve15 As i said, send an email to feedback@codechef.com and explain why it is your solution and not someone else’s.Also send them a link of this discussion. @adjimmy your first solution : code 3417177 was submitted at 9.18 pm while @vishalkarve15 had an AC solution (3417146) submitted at 9.16 pm. Also he had been submitting it from around 5.00 pm so your claim of being the first to come up the solution is is pretty weak. You can send an email to codechef people and try to prove your point.
@vishalkarve15 Next time please avoid using Ideone and if you have no other option then login and keep your submissions private. It is very difficult to determine who has not cheated and innocent people may get punished at times.
I have used the same implementation of Union find for HDELIVER in easy( CodeChef: Practical coding for everyone ). This implementation is also in the setters solution. I dont know how the other user’s algo is similar to mine
@vishalkarve15 >> “yes it was ideone… what should i do?” You should first get a life! And then get something to test code locally. Don’t fool around with everyone here.
@kunal361, yes. sorry. I deleted the old comment so that someone doesn’t get confused. It should be private, as it is mentioned in the rules of long contests.