First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has spared some time to read this.
Now that I have your attention, I’m sure all of you are familiar with the oldest and THE most famous problem on this site that is clubbed in the Beginners section: H1 (haven’t? Here: H1 Problem - CodeChef).
Admit it, you’ve spent a good amount of time thinking of a strategy to swap those tiles in an efficient way that works towards the solution and not away from it.
But recently, I was just checking the submissions and OH BOY what I saw. If you sort the submissions by ascending time, literally every submission to the problem IS EXACTLY THE SAME! except the first two, which are the fastest.
Fastest two:
https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/23188992
https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/22032142
Surprisingly though, THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME TOO!
And all the next submissions are just blatant copies of another code that’s hundredth of a second slower, and this continues for a number of pages.
One guy even went so far as to change the whitespacing to avoid the “strict” plagiarism check employed by CodeChef.
Blatant whitespace submission:
https://www.codechef.com/viewsolution/17851364
Every other code is a copy of a glorious piece of code that someone worked so hard on and spent their precious time on.
So, what is bugging me out: Did these guys work in groups or does CodeChef not check submissions anymore after a contest is over?
Thank you for listening to my rant. Forever-2-Star out!