I strongly disagree that long contest should be removed. I participated second time this October and I learned a lot. Had it been a 3 hour contest, I would have lost hope of solving any problem be it in practice alone. Long contest are made for beginners to keep up the motivation.
I absolutely support the idea! Long challenges have always given me enormous pleasure and enjoyable time (I have a dedicated post explaining how I solved one of these problems over the course of a couple of days research, which proves my enthusiasm), but being long they are inherently susceptible to being abused by a plethora of local heroes with unclear and less than ideal intentions. This is simply wrong. The idea itself is more than great, but CodeChef has become way too popular to afford keeping these contests in its agenda.
Every time a long challenge starts, unethical CC members start posting questions to multiple forums asking for direct help on how to solve the problems from the contest. We also see a big number of extremely suspicious AC submissions, filled up with foolish attempts to confuse the plagiarism-detecting software, by spreading all over unused variable assignments, etc.
The genuine programmers can and should easily shine only within short contests. The cheating there becomes very hard to impossible. If you dare say you have skills, go and demonstrate them in 2-3-4-5 hours contests, otherwise nobody can trust you 100%.
The scale of people interest that CC has achieved already definitely requires some measures to be taken by admins.
I like to help others, hence i joined, also some people share offcampus placement news, that is second reason, i didn’t joined to help in cheating.
It has been 2 years since I am participating in long challenges and I have learned CP from long challenges . In a last few months it has become a trend to say that long challenges are easy and everyone can get to 5 or 6 star by simply searching on the web .
Just a simple question to ask If it is so easy to get higher ratings using long then why there is
Less than 100 indian students above rating 2300.
I do not participate in short challenges in CC but you can see me participate in many short challenges in other platforms .
- I am not throwing around any accusations but its usually the cheaters who overestimate the prevalance of cheating.
- Rating keeps one motivated to participate, fight and learn. This is a proven fact.
- OP gained 43 points in July Long, 50 in August Long, 94 points in September Long. He lost 66 points in August short.
- Cheating is very easily possible in Short Contests too. I won’t tell how, but its very very easy. In fact, I can beat a group of three cheaters who are 80% as good as me in every long contest. But I can never beat them in ANY short contest.
- There is no evidence to support that codechef isn’t internationally reputed. In fact, the top 20 in many codechef contests aren’t even Indians.
- Regarding the accusation of OP that people make too many submissions to get the right answer, there is nothing wrong with incrementalism in life. OP forgets how many attempts he took to figure out why built in log function won’t work for FIBEASY: CodeChef: Practical coding for everyone
Some are working in Companies so they can solve the problem in 10 day Long challenge and learn something new…
What about not revealing all the problems at once in a single day and make the contest 7 day long.
Just like hackerearth.
I think you didn’t read the post carefully.
Replying to
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Exactly my point. If I had gained more points in shorts, I would’ve felt better myself, cuz it’s far more challenging to do good in shorts than longs imo.
P.S. FYI I gained 5 points in an August short too. -
I think you missed the point where I mentioned you indeed get to learn a lot of intricate details from the longs, as is seen from my attempts for FIBEASY : CodeChef: Practical coding for everyone , and infact many other problems of various longs, and that process is FUN too!
But just saying, don’t you think if CC had a few more short contests, it would’ve been better?
We have a lot many platforms for short contests like Codeforces, topcoder and Atcoder.
Long contests motivate us to work hard on a problem for a long time. If i uspsolve i give up in an hour and go for the editorials. The point i am trying to make is long contest help us improve A LOT!!!
Maybe maybe…
Long Challenges give me time to put to actual code a lot of complicated data structures techniques that I have heard about/discover during contest week. The points serve as a motivation for me to write the code. I think I implemented Min Cost Max Flows, HLD, Gaussian Elimination, FFT for sums of powers etc…, for the first time here only because I was getting points in the long challenge and it is good motivation to learn stuff and add some more skills to my repertoire.
By the way for the tough questions I doubt if there is much plagiarism, as coming up with solutions isn’t trivial. The smart ppl who come up with it don’t like to reveal the idea, coz they worked to solve it. So basically stop crying about ratings and what ppl are doing and work your way up like you should if you really are so affected by ratings.
Long Challenges provide an opportunity to learn which is why you see top coders participating there. It is the hunger to learn more than anything else [For some it’s getting some cash, but those are at a different level]. Short Contests don’t teach you as much.
codechef should host weekly contest of 2.30 - 3 hrs and remove long challenge
I think after solving like 4-5 long challenges, one should move to short contests. I realized my short comings then (how terrible my speed and accuracy was) Now at the moment i find short contests more fun🤣, specially when you’re improving…and your rating graph on CF sky rocket😍
@megatron10 thanks for the tips…I was able to solve 3 questions today in CF Div 2 and fast too
Yes more short contests good. More long rated contests also good.
Making Long Challenges Unrated will demotivate us because Short contests will be a great exercise and it will surely help us to learn but most of them who learn CP by attending short contests lose ratings. They gain back it only by attending long challenge. The one who sincerely attend long challenge who are true to themself (I am not talking about those who create a second account after reaching division 1 just show of their skills against division 2 coders) find long challenge the most intresting.
The first 2 problems is solved by a 3* programmer within a day but for the next 9 days its the rest of the question that drives him. It highly motivates everyone.
I agree with the point that increasing short contests will make us learn a lot.
I disagree with the point that making long challenges unrated.
I disagree with this as I usually participate in long contests, I will prefer two have 2 longs replaced by short contests.
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As I am working I don’t get much time to sit for short contests as these are held usually at night and in weekends.
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As I am loosing touch in short contests, sitting for short contests once in 3 months doesn’t make sense as I won’t up solve.
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About cheating we can’t do much just report it to admin whenever you witness such practice. In Last Long challenge I reported one.
One has got to understand that no MOSS checker can substitute for honor code.
And the beauty of honor code is that it cannot be codified.
Let me give an example. Say I don’t know about Euler Tour, is it okay to consult geeksforgeeks? Yes! Is it okay to use exceptional search engine skills to somehow find what data structure/technique would work for a question? Yes.
Is it okay to ask “Hey do I select an edge to be removed to break graph into two graphs” to a friend? Probably yes or no.
Is it okay to ask “how do I solve this question?” Probably not. But doesnt it also depend on the person being asked? If my cousin who studies in class XI asks me this question, and if I reply “study up about DFS and look at entry and exit points and search cp-algorithms”, its probably fine. But I tell him to google “bridge code” - its probably unethical.
Ultimately it all depends on honour system. And honour is about being honest to oneself.
nopes, not happening.
You have got some good points but I don’t think it is a good idea.
The reason I love Long Challenges is because I like to code when I feel like coding not when the competition wants me to! So it gives me a window to participate.
This post make me comment for the first time in years, so you can understand how much I love long challenges
I, for one, will quite vehemently argue that LC is actually good. A part of the reason is personal, that I’m far better at problems when I get a lot of time to think about them: for instance, I can do many med-hard problems in a day but many times even medium level problems take me a full hour to code. To someone like me LC is the highlight of the month.
But alright, I agree that’s not much of a reason. Let me come the the other reasons I have for LC to stay. The level of final few problems you’ll find on LC far exceeds most of the problems you find in other contests. This means that while in cook-off etc the solution mostly involves “standard” techniques which are “expected”, in the long challenge every time there’s some new lesser known techniques exhibited. This means that the learning is better in LC.
Furthermore, it is a long challenge: it’s expected some people will “cheat” on the challenge (I’m not justifying it, just saying it is inevitable). While I’m totally against a copy pasta type of cheating, I believe that if a person reads an editorial of some other problem and gets the idea to solve a problem in LC, it is not “exactly” cheating. As long as you aren’t copying someone else’s code you are learning something in the process. And in most cases, especially for the harder half of the LC, there arent many articles/blogs that immediately tell you how to solve it. For instance you may not be so fresh about segment trees and may read up something on it, but the fact the you realized you had to use segment trees was the major hurdle of the problem. This implies that unless you know what you want to do, you will not get any material online that helps you do it.
This of course, assumes you do not copy-paste the solution from someone else’s code. Those who do usually never make it to the top 100 or so, so the people who come to LC for competing don’t lose out much in the process.