Hello coders , As you all know, this time LONG challenge will be rated only for div2 & div3 only , i want to know what are div1 coder’s thoughts on this decision.
Update 1 :- (07-05-2021)
It was officially confirmed that this was a temporary decision.
I will
- participate in LONG Challenge even it was unrated / I don’t care about rating
- not participate in LONG Challenge anymore since it was unrated
- Long should be rated for Div1
I hope you all will participate in long whether it was rated or unrated.
PS :- ( my thoughts )
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I personally don’t care that much about rating , yes it was a good motivation factor for participation for me , but not the main reason for paricipation , the main reason for my participation is to increase my problem solving skills , practice programming and learn new cool algorithms , since long challenge is a 10 day contest i can work on the problem when i’m free in any day.
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One problem with this decision is that , the participation of div1 people in long is very low , and now if this becomes unrated , probably it will become even low.
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This may be a one time thing , lunchtime is postponed and in the previous long div1 and div2 have the same problem set, so maybe they are low on hard problems, that why maybe they made it unrated for div1.
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And finally about cheating , people will cheat in short contest too , and the argument that in short contest time will be a factor so cheating doesn’t matter was not correct , since if cheater can obtain more number of solution than an honest coder, he will be ranked higher than him. so to tackle cheater we need a different solution other than making the contest unrated.
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Though I am not eligible to comment, I would like to share my thoughts on this. Codechef is lacking a good number of Difficult problems for Div 1. So, it’s not correct to keep the contest rated for Div 1. This may not be true, it is just a conclusion I drew from the posts I read long back.
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@suman_18733097 , this is exactly what i was thinking , if this is the case then they will again make long rated for div1 in next contest or so.
Won’t it make more sense if it’s made unrated for div 2,3? I mean barely ~200 people participate in long from div-1 and also div-1 witnesses the least amount of plagiarism.
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I guess they did it for cheaters. The ones who are still div2 if cheat can become 5 star and they will be in div1. now to increase rating they need to participate in cookoff and lunchtime. even if someone obtains code somewhere he / she will have problem changing code before submitting it. giving honest coders a chance to obtain higher ranks if they can solve it. Also cheater are either stuck with their ratings. To get call from companies now they have to participate in cookoff and lunchtime and if not able to get as high rank as they used to get will make the rating system deduct sweetly from them. Also good coders in division 1 can keep on obtaining ratings from lunchtime and cookoff. one smart admin i must say
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Yeah now that makes sense, still they can make it unrated for div-2 too.
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not make it unrated but maybe make it so that u cant become a 5 star by obtaining a good rank on long challenges ,i.e maybe put a cap on how much the rating can increase and to what extent.
@discopose12 , true , it makes sense , but one thing that was wrong with this argument is that it disregards the fact that Long and Short challenges are two different types of contests.
In long , i will take my time to solve the problem , learn new algorithms , implement them and do testing on the different solutions for evaluating their relative advantages and disadvantages.
People who are good at short are also good at long but not vice versa. like Me.
may be they wanna collect data on who had it easy going from div2 to div1 . but not able to stay there. may be this will give an indication on relevant skill level of programmers
True. But only few questions in div2 are challenging and requires to learn something. like last 3 out of 10 questions + challenge problem
In lunchtime only 1 or 1 and half problems are hard and require out of box time and efficiency to get good rank. Supoose you can change few parts of segment tree to solve a certain problem. But the implementation is tricky and you get is wrong a few times. A good programmer(example BenQ) changes that under few minutes like it was no big deal. So just because we both solved the same problem and get same score doesn’t mean we are same. Programming is also about who is good at writing scenarios as code. So going by that you can solve most problems other do in little time(as only last problem is problematic in cookoff and lunchtime)
The downside is that many people are looking to lose their rank in coming cookoff/ lunchtime due to less practice of solving and IMPLEMENTING problems quickly
I kind of got all problems of lunchtime including ALLGRAPHS. but when i started implementing and debugging it started taking time. i was getting wrong answers due to bad code/ wrong implementation some edge case and also comming with solutions which were long and problematic like solving SPTREE USING LCA. It took a lot of time only to realise a simple dfs and rooting at a would have made it so much easier. A good programmer will have few of this. Thus your 6* rating now would matter more.
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Even though I’m in division 2, long challenges becoming unrated would be a great thing for me. Personally I don’t have 10 days of time to spend on a single contest. In every long, I usually want to try 2-3 problems at max. While I used to do this, I can’t do it anymore since I want to increase my rating to be able to participate in division 1 contests.
Just wanted to ask, how much of algorithm learning are you actually able to do during a long challenge? What I really mean is, are you able to find out which algorithm a problem requires during the contest if you haven’t heard about it before?
@arujbansal1 , besides basic algorithms , like sorting , dfs , bfs , i almost learned all algorithms while doing long in codechef and circuits in Hackerearth. some of them are segment tree , finding quadratic residue , mod operations , Red-Black trees , prefix sum arrays , etc. The way to find this algorithms or atleast how i did is to search google with required opeation that we want to perfom , ofcourse i was not able to find all algorithms , but i did find almost all medium level algos by this method. I was answering your question assuming your question is not sarcastic.
I wanted to participate in my First Long Challenge this month, but since it’s not rated i probably won’t
A lot of people are here for fun. not just learning, if it’s not rated… it’s not fun !
To be honest, the statement “I don’t care about rating because im here to learn” is overused bs.
Competitive Sport is fun…because of rating. remove the rating, and it’ll become similar to class assignments
@admin Please make it rated for Div 1 users as well
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It should still be rated for div1 imo. The rating factor actually acts as a force to push participants to thoroughly research problems they aren’t able to do. There are some pretty difficult problems (for my level) that I have solved in the past in Long challenges after thinking and trying for days and I don’t think I would’ve pushed that hard if the contest wasn’t rated.
I think they have made a right step. I’ve seen most of my friends just participated in 2 long challenges and got 4⭐. In my college hostel, 2-5 students solves the problems together and rest all just ask them for solution. This is not the right thing. What I think it should be rated only for div 3 who’re absolute beginner so that they can get a push.
If someone really care about learning, he will try to solve questions even it is unrated.
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ADD OPTION: I Will probably start participating again in LONGs since they are unrated for me.
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i wanted to edit the poll too , but i’m afraid it will reset the votes.
I stopped participating as soon as i felt there is way too much cheating and moved on to codeforces, but if long challenge are unrated for div1 i don’t have any problem participating, everyone loves to solve good problems and i personally feel like codechef long’s have a unique problem set. So i will start to participate again, i used to like codeChef i guess i could give it a try at least.
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