Weird Bug in Challenge problem

Even I was confused during the whole contest and have tried reporting it to feedback@codechef.com during the contest.

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This is not at all fair,
and i was amazed how 2200+ people solved this?
@admin ??

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same, I kept thinking how to approach this problem.
All we had to do was randomly type numbers and get 99 points.
This is cheating.

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@admin If you’re doing 99 points giveaway then everyone should’ve known.
Randomly output numbers

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with a 70% success rate !
70% success rate wasn’t even on problem 3

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I’ve not done a Challenge problem before, but aren’t they re-judged on the full set of training data after the Contest ends? If so, I’m betting that people who just output 1 1 0 aren’t going to end up with very high scores.

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It is rejudged but not on any special test cases. The constraints of the problem clearly mention that 10^5 raisins are chosen uniformly among all numbers comprime to 720720. Given the constraints, it’s unlikely to be able reduce the price by much. The only cases where the area can be reduced is when the raisins are far apart and dense on a row or column, which is fairly unlikely

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Was the problem statement hidden from you? :slight_smile: Were the other coders given any extra information that you weren’t? If not, I don’t see how this can be considered unfair at all. Anyone could have read the statement (and had 10 days to do so), and figured out that there are easy points available here. The challenge of course is in figuring out how to optimize it further, and that’s what matters in the ranklist. The absolute difference in scores doesn’t matter at all, if other problems are same. It’s the ranklist which matters, and even a small difference in scores affects the ranklist in the same way as a larger difference.

Could the scoring have been better? Probably. This definitely wasn’t ideal.
But is this unfair? I don’t see why.

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@admin.
Could you please tell me were there only 2 test cases to check for this problem? Because i can see many people just checking for only those two test cases and they arq getting 99 points!

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You’d know the answer to your question if you read the problem statement :slight_smile: It’s explained there.

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Then why the setter has written -minimise the final price of the cake. Even though printing any answer like 1 1 0 giving them 99 pts . Is this is the minimised solution which diserve 99 pts? What about those people who thought about the efficiency solution couldn’t due to the difficulty in implementing the algorithm?

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Hey @admin was the raisins question meant to check the plagiarism you were just checking who all will write the same text as output:sweat_smile::sweat_smile:

They might end up getting high score but it’s completely fair because challenge problem’s score is relative. It’s their bad if they don’t even try solving the problem.
It’s not this contest, but in every contest people get non zero score for submitting random solutions.
Even printing random numbers in proper range can optimize some problems.
I totally agree with admin.

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R u blind ? Don’t you see lots of people getting 99+ score on challenge problem ?
You should at least try it when you see everyone getting more than 99. It simply means people are submitting random solns.
Next time onwards read each and every problem and try submitting whatever you can. If you don’t even try then it’s your loss :slight_smile:
@prabhat_7 @ayush4

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The problem was serving the purpose of breaking ties among people. And it was meant to be for this purpose only.

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This is the first time i came across this type of problem. i tried my best to solve this problem but at the end of the day i was not able to solve. So after completion of contest i went through some of the successful submission and i found out that most of them has printed 1 1 0 and even some one has submitted text file containing test case and they got AC , i am really feeling very bad that after spending complete one day i was not able to solve but some of us has got AC by doing just nothing.

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You learnt how challenge problem works now.
One can’t have a very good solution then he should try submitting whatever he can. No matter how bad is his solution. This is how challenge problem works.

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No one got 99 by doing nothing. Contestants who could figure out that printing 1 1 0 could give them AC, got 99.
Everyone had same information available in problem.

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yes, i am blind, because i was trying this challenge problem for the very first time. and i think some were also blind, but either they were lucky that’s why they got 99 points, but unfortunately not me!

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bro, was trying for the very first time. i wasn’t aware that challenge question can be this lower class also. where just copy paste 2 test cases will give 99 points.
if i would have been aware i definitely would have done that question first.

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