OK, it seems I’m in minority regarding opinion on this one And I’m probably going to be rather harsh here.
Come on, looking at this problem it is kinda obvious that it has been used before (and more than once).
I wouldn’t call it “copied” problem - with this kind of wording it sounds to me like setter is being accused with taking a problem from other source instead of preparing it by himself. I don’t think it is the case here
It is definitely not a good idea to give such task, and it is a fault by setter/tester to not check it, or at least a very questionable decision to use the problem if they knew that “smallest subarray with sum greater than a given value” Google query will give you enormous number of results. People say N^2 was passing - OK, that’s probably another fault by tester.
Yet overall mood of comments is really weird to me. It is both funny and sad at the same time. OK, maybe I don’t get that “make it unrated” part because I don’t care about rating; but assuming one would care about rating, I’m trying to imagine a situation when somebody says “let’s make a CF round unrated because this problem is similar to following problem from past contest” after the round… This kind of decisions would be a great way to make CF unpopular
Cheating? I even had to re-check code of conduct at CodeChef to be sure that it doesn’t contain yet another weird trashy rule. OK, my bad - indeed, they do have one for it. Fine, you can call these guys cheaters because they didn’t add a comment clarifying that the original code wasn’t authored by them. Because that’s exactly what’s required here for third party code. Yet another weird rule which is different from what you are used to at any other competitive programming platform, but I don’t even want to waste my time on criticizing it more
Going back to these “copying problem” accusations - I’m not going to say that I know for sure that it didn’t happen here… But here is how it looks right now: I see a lot of comments saying the same, half of them are written by newbies, and they accuse strong contestants of ICPC WF level who are also experienced setters in stealing a problem. Not “not checking if a problem is well known”, but “copying a problem”. And just to make it more funny, this “copying” occurred on filler task. Yep, it wasn’t that typical “we got all the easy problems for a set, and now we need some nice idea for hard problem, let’s look for it”, but instead two yellow/red guys decided to steal a filler problem which has to be added to the set because it must contain 5 problems and because contestants of all levels participate there. Sure, that’s exactly how contests are being prepared.
On a side note, talking about the contest itself - I’d say that it wasn’t the best contest at Codechef ever (and this particular issue adds it another negative score), but it was generally OK, problems were nice and clear, and I wouldn’t like to get this setter lost for CodeChef simply because somebody wasn’t happy with the fact that filler task has been used before.