@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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I think it should be clear why team participation is allowed in Codechef contests. One of this site’s declared missions is to help train the Indian ACM teams. As a former ACM contestant and couch, @mugurelionut should know that even in cases of really skilful individual participants, it is important that they also train as a team. (The short contest may be more useful for this, due to the time pressure it involves.) Team participation should not only be allowed, but also encouraged. Yet, for fairness reasons, separate rankings for teams and individuals should exist.
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