ChaosAngel's blog

Rule about third-party code is changing (satire)
By ChaosAngel, history, 2 years ago, In English

Hello Sir. I got the following message: "Attention! Your solution 3242387453 for the problem 1679B significantly coincides with solutions notacheater1/12341324, notacheater2/2343546. Such a coincidence is a clear rules violation and will result in your immediate arrest and prosecution according to the Codeforces No-Bob-and-Alice law. Note that unintentional leakage is also a violation and carries the same prison sentence."

I am not a cheater and I swear on my rating I would never cheat. I was just running a telegram group with 150 people in the contest, and we were trading solutions with each other on condition that we change the variable names. Sometimes I even replaced the while loops with for loops to make sure the code was inventive. And sometimes I didn't because I thought the systests would find it funny if there were 100 identical solutions. Please it was not on purpose I did not know this was not allowed, the terms and conditions that ARE PRESENT AT EVERY REGISTRATION are too long to read so I thought contests are like e-bay, solution goes to the highest bidder. Also, me and my team of 150 notcheaters only managed to solve AB together, so please give us back our ratings otherwise some of us will end up with negative rating and go to codeforces jail.

This post isn't attacking everyone on that blog, only the knowing cheaters who have the audacity to top it off with ludicrous lies and excuses. Some people are truly innocent, others own up to their mistakes.

But for real, the excuses are utterly ridiculous. That blog should be closed for commenting; it keeps showing up in my feed and it makes my blood boil to see the amount of lying and cheating that goes on there. It is an affront to the community.

Let's end this with a small stat: there are over 1400 posts on that blog, and the word "admit" is used 25 times.

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2 years ago, # |
← Rev. 3   Vote: I like it +12 Vote: I do not like it

Every time I click on that blog, my browser gets hanged due to a lot of comments on that. Previous comments should be deleted, or a separate process should be made to report their innocence.

MikeMirzayanov can you create a new blog or any other effective measure which can help?

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2 years ago, # |
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My slow ass laptop can't even load that thread anymore.

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2 years ago, # |
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In this round that code for D should have been flying everywhere in CF. And it came to me also. Honestly, I've been tempted. Maybe a bit greedy too. So I edited it a bit and submitted it. My choices were wrong, I apologize from the deepest of my heart. I will kindly accept the downvotes and the skipping, so please go on ahead. I pledge never to copy any code during a round from now on.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    Ok

    Spoiler
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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I Don't want apology I want your account Ban.

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      Did something happen that I don't know? I think he should be punished, but not banned.

      Well, I see. That's the rule. But personally, I still don't want him to be banned.

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2 years ago, # |
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I already wrote somewhere that we should display very, very explicit rules somewhere. Although all of this is covered by the rules, a certain percentage of people will be idiots and ignore them anyway. I would put the following both in the registration thing and in the mail sent to people who get plagiarism strikes:

  1. Discussing a problem at all, even implementation or "general approaches" during the contest counts as cheating.
  2. Submitting the same code from multiple accounts counts as cheating: if you started participating on one account, do not switch to another account.
  3. Unintentionally leaking your code counts as cheating: it is your responsibility to make sure your code does not reach the hands of cheaters.
  4. If you are guilty, writing an apology or saying that "this won't happen again" will not grant you an one-time exception or restore your ratings.

Yes, even then people will ignore them, but if even 20% of them stop (even if not stop cheating, at least stop writing excuses such as above in "Rule about third-party..."), I would consider it a great success.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I accept the rules. My submissions were skipped, and I understand your opinion. My apology has no "hidden intentions", I just thought my guilt would stay until I apologize, hence there would be no better way to get over this than a sincere apology. I hope you understand my apology, and also noone should copy codes. See you in a week or two for the next round I will participate, and I will truly prove my skills by myself that time.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    And punishment even for a single cheating incident should be perma ban. Right now it's just equal to some negative delta which isn't close to being strong enough.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    lol 2nd point happened once to me when I bricked a contest but wanted to see what my friends were doing so i switched to main, then accidentally sumbitted solution from my main account and lost rating.

    tl;dr, use alts only if you know how to use them

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      lol, that's a hilarious excuse and it doesn't make you look any better

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2 years ago, # |
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People that write on that post claiming innocence and are still found guilty should be banned. It's a huge waste of time for everyone.

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2 years ago, # |
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Sometimes they even try giving us lessons like “Mr. mike sometimes the problem is simple enough and all codes will be similar” or “I checked the codes and they really aren’t similar”.

But yeah I agree that this really is a disgrace and accounts should be banned more often.

In the last round for example, solutions were leaked on youtube and I think the correct course of action should be to make the round unrated. BUT, is it that easy to just do that every time you have a bad performance and ruin the rounds for other people who did well?

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I think the correct course of action should be to make the round unrated.

    1. Get a bad delta.
    2. Leak the solutions on YouTube.
    3. After massive cheating, beg Mike to make the round unrated.
    4. Profit!
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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      Yes it's bad and I mentioned that. On the other hand, do you think that leaking solutions of YouTube can be countered by just using the plagiarism checker? In the end I'm just having fun so it's fine if I didn't figure out a problem that was leaked, I'm just saying that cheaters should be dealt with in a more serious way.

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        2 years ago, # ^ |
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        Probably the plagiarism checker can be improved.

        Of course the real solution is to somehow get rid of these desperate job seekers who invaded Codeforces a few years ago.

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          2 years ago, # ^ |
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          I agree in your second point. As for the first, I don't think the problem is with the plagiarism checker (I think it already performs fairly good) the issue is with how are we treating cheaters after catching them, either there account should be suspended or there rating should decrease a lot more than it now does.

          There can also be a "cheat number" displayed next to each account, being the number of times this account was caught by the plagiarism checker. This way if a contestant want to reset this number he'd have to start a new account which means his rating was reset to 0 and I think that's a better way to deal with them.

          This idea is based of the assumption that a profile with a positive cheat number will be discredited by companies. And if companies don't take such numbers as red flags for potential employees then I don't know anymore.

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22 months ago, # |
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well said ChaosAngel from the penalteam

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