Maybe @aawisong which is from NK knows something about this? I remember people e-mailed when the issue of having perfect absolute score in challenge problem showed up… So maybe talking to him could help sorting this out? If I remember (I was a setter for that contest) he replied to the e-mail we sent him…Maybe we can contact in again on this matter?
sacrificing long contests for the sake of few violaters of the contest? c’mon buddy.
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I agree with your point of view @skrcode but as @garakchy said sacrificing long contests is not a solution.
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@mugurelionut I was mentioning both the article writers and the participants. There is a comment on codeforces which also mentions the same article. I’m pretty sure they’re a team, the other links for ACM and IPSC in your post point to that. I strongly believe they did not do this on purpose but it’s still unfair to everyone else that followed the rules. They should be contacted and asked to compete as individuals. If we can’t reach them directly we can try to reach out to @aawisong and see if we can contact them through him/her as @kuruma proposed.
I agree that cheating in long contests (either by working in teams or by asking help from external sources) is much easier than in short contests, but I also agree with @junior94 and @garakchy : there’s something really appealing with the format of a long contest and it would be a pity to sacrifice such a format just because of higher chances of cheating.
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@aforapple: I don’t understand your comment other than “you should follow kuruma’s advice”. Anyway, I don’t think that I should do anything more about it. I raised the question and I provided the sources which lead me to this question. If the Codechef team (@admin) is interested in the issue, then they should follow up on it. If they don’t follow up on it, they probably tacitly allow team participation (maybe because it’s very difficult to verify/discover it) - maybe such behavior happened in other cases, too ; I only noticed the North Korean cases because they won multiple times.
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@all and @mugurelionut in particular, if you want me to link admin to this post, I can do it easily, since it’s easy for me to get in touch with them… It seems to me that sometimes they tend to let these kind of posts fall back and while for the vast majority of us this is not so harmful, I can believe it might feel unfair to you as a top “individual” competitor, to be competing versus an entire team… If you still want this to reach admin asap let us know trough here (I believe Suraj is online on hangouts, so there’s a big chance he’ll read this as soon as I forward it to him)
@kuruma the implication is obvious bro. only linking wont be enough, also urge them to take immediate action, if you can, pls.
@kuruma: I have to say that now that I know that they’re competing as teams, I find this an extra incentive to try to outperform them in future contests 
[ I mean - beating a team in a contest is way cooler than beating an individual and losing against a team of people is not so bad, since I’m just 1 person ]. But, anyway, I don’t think competing as teams is fair to anyone (not just to me). Maybe it would help if someone from the Codechef team reminded them that these are individual contest and, in case they competed as teams before, they shouldn’t do that anymore.
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Team samjay is ready for them.
@mugurelionut: I thought you would react like that 
[being even more motivated to beat them!] And I find that awesome! Nontheless, I just flagged this post to @admin and will now leave this matter on their hands
@aforapple , I dont get you, ICPC is a team contest, so obviously practising and participating in teams with give the teams more edge than practising individually.
@skrcode , I completely agree with you, According to me coming top 50 or so globally in long contest is not really that big of a deal. I have read discussions on russian forums where they said that “codechef long contest is evil”, maybe thats why we see a lot of top russian coders competing and winning in short contests and not many of them are interested in long contest.
@aforapple: Please avoid posting baseless comments. Imagine yourself, difficult as it may seen, to work hard for 10 days and be beaten just because of multiple people working for just 3-4 days with different approaches. As for practicing against teams, we can only increase our skill if we compete with moderately higher ranked players; You don’t get better at chess by directly playing Viswanathan Anand.
@skrcode, @v_akshay: “Is coming top 50 or so globally really a big deal…?”, “According to me coming top 50 or so globally in long contest is not really that big of a deal.” Really? Is this the type of mindset you put into a contest you participate in? And about the Russian forums, I don’t know if they were talking about cheating or the amount of time given to solve the problems but you can’t just take their word for it. Most of these coders already thrive on short contests. Long contests give us the opportunity to know what can we actually solve without the added pressure.
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And if you can perform well in long contest, you’re not that far from performing well on short ones but short ones require a lot more training and experience. I think by participating in all the Contests you can is part of that training. The top Russian coders have already done a great deal of training and they are still doing it but deciding not to take part in a contest is not a big loss for them. The same can’t be said for us, if we can’t be in the Top 50 regularly and we still say that it’s not a big deal we won’t get anywhere.
Being in the Top 50(by yourself) is a big deal,it takes effort. That said, I think Codechef should be a little more active ensuring the rules are being followed. There may be a lot of participants but if nothing is done to prevent this it won’t get any better. We can’t give cheaters the ability to stop our progress, we can’t keep letting them sabotage our experience and give a bad name to Long Contests, when they’re caught proper measures should be taken to ensure that either they don’t do it again or they’re banned for good, if they’re not caught we can just assume that it was a fair contest.
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@himanshu_9419: I am also certain that ACRush is just an individual competitor, just like most of us. I was just saying that one of the North Korean articles mentioned “team ACRush”. Maybe they honestly believed that Codechef long contests were team contests and that everyone participated in teams.
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@v_akshay: Can you provide a link to a Russian forum where they mention, as you said, that “codechef long contest is evil”? I am curious why they would say such a thing. It’s OK if the forum is in Russian - I will try to use Google Translate to read it. Personally, I cannot understand why anyone would say that these contests are “evil”. Sure, the competition is very tough and getting a top spot is very hard, because they require not just classical algorithmic skills (9/10 problems), but also challenge problem skills (which are kind of a different category). But “evil”?
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