Meta Hacker Cup 2024
Meta Hacker Cup is back! We’re excited to announce our schedule for our 2024 season, kicking off on September 20th!
- Practice Round: Fri. September 20th, 10am Pacific (72 hours)*
- Round 1: Sat. October 5th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
- Round 2: Sat. October 19th, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
- Round 3: Sat. November 2nd, 10am Pacific (3 hours)
- Finals: Sat. December 7th, 6am Pacific (4 hours)
*While optional, we recommend you participate in the Practice Round to familiarize yourself with our submission system before Round 1, when time will be at a premium.
The contest will be held on the Meta Hacker Cup site. Registration will open July 24th.
You can expect familiar prizes in the human track, including T-Shirts, Elite T-Shirts, and cash prizes for finalists. We’ll announce more prize details closer to Round 2.
Introducing the Meta Hacker Cup AI Track
For the first time this year, we'll also be running an AI track. In it, instead of solving problems manually, contestants will create an autonomous code generation system before the start of the contest. Each contestant can compete either in the human track or the AI track, but not both.
We hope this will create an interesting benchmark for how well state-of-the-art machines are able to perform against the best programmers in the world on complex programming tasks. If you're interested in competing in the AI track, you can join our discord server to learn more.
Yayyy... Finally it's happening! Another chance for a T-Shirt!!
give me your t-shirt. xD
2023 season?
Nice catch, thanks!
It's happening!! Super excited!
yay , super excited !!!!
how hard to be ranked in 2000 in Meta Hacker Cup compare to Div1+2 round in cf?
I'm genuinely curious
same question here lol
I guess around 4-5 question in div 1+2
Yayy.... it's happening!!! very excited to participate for the first time.
why doesnt hacker cup use simple testing like codeforces does. i had a really hard time last season
Counting down the days to Meta Hacker Cup 2024. Long live Hacker Cup!
Too bad Codeforces doesn't have "haha" react
Because the ai submissions will fall on their face?
Good luck to you @Swistakk . Last time you missed final round by just 44 seconds. This time, I am rooting for you to reach Final <3 .
Thank you! Recalling that I was so close last year actually gives me some hope xD
nice, i am excited! i hope ill get t-shirt :)
Same thing every year. Make promises to change submission format at the end of the year, and keep it same the next year :clown:
Real sad Google stopped organizing. They were the only ones who did annual programming contests right.
https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/119880?#comment-1063469
Where did they promise?
Maybe 'promise' wasn't the right word, but I've been here long enough to recall SecondThread talking about updating the format. Even the comment you linked says they are looking into it. It used to be a fine format when there were so many annual contests, and it diversified the submission formats a bit. Now, I think it may be time to consider updating it for real. The only reason I can think of for not doing so is that they actually haven't put in any effort. Anyway, good luck everyone, may the stack limit be with you.
Perhaps they looked into it, decided it wasn't right for whatever reason, and moved on. Why do people want to make contests as same and boring as possible?
By boring you're talking about a submission format that reduces stress for participants? I'm sure it even reduces stress for them cos they won't have to answer hundreds of clarifications.
Or maybe get an actual IDE? Cause I bet that all of the top coders have their own IDEs which can compile the large testcase in literally ≤ 1 min.
I fail to see how an IDE helps here
well the only reason it's stressful would be if you test and your compiler can't process the testcase. And that can be solved using an IDE with the proper configurations. Otherwise the time limit is definitely sufficient.
How does a compiler process a testcase? You should read about IDEs, text editors, and compilers to understand their functions. You're mixing stuff up. Even if you're using the fastest IDE (whatever that is) how fast the program executes is still dependent on your computer specs.
nvm
I wanted to point out that the date of the finals coincides with the date of the Putnam collegiate math competition. It is not uncommon for people who are interested in competitive programming to also take part in such math competitions. Perhaps this could be looked at.
Sir, is the submission system same like last time? If yes, please change it to like some online judges or like codeforces.
and
Why are we not allowing a contestant participate in both the human track and the AI track?
Does it even matter? Nobody is going to choose the AI path anyways (I have only 3 candidates in mind and they are all companies)
Maybe because the problem statements are same?
Yep, this is why
How will the T-Shirt be looking this year
why dont u post youtube streams nowadays
love your channel
Instead of having a timer for test data download, will AI participants have a timer for problem statement download? :pepesmug:
Yep. And your timer will start when the contest starts. So it’ll be like a 6 minute contest basically.
Finally!!
Is the judge system same as before like locally running and submit results?
Yes
Hi everyone. I have a question: Will they deliver T-shirts to Ukraine?
Hi! The T-shirts are delivered by FedEx
If our delivery partners ship to your region, then we will. I recall last year Ukraine was one of the regions that FedEx didn't ship to. I'm not sure if this has changed since then.
Yes yes yes yes let's goooooooo
letss gooo
LETS GO HACKER CUP IS BACK!!!
is it happening?
Is the only on-site round is the last? I also wanna know what is the difference between the AI and human versions?
The difference is written in the blog
Excited
What is the last date of registration?
as its written, today is the day when registration starts, but its showing page is unavailable.
If you weren't signed into facebook before, we were accidentally preventing you from seeing the page before because your age verification was failing. It's fixed now.
Why does the page show unavailable? The registration starts today right?
It should be available now; please try again.
Was there always an age limit?
Yes, it is and has been in our terms of service
didn't seemed to be a problem last year.
How comprehensive will the test cases be (if there will be any)? From what I have seen, test cases tend to make or break the solution search strategy in attempts at autonomous code generation like AlphaCode, for example.
Do you mean in the full data? We'll endeavor to make them comprehensive as we usually do, but there's always the general possibility that there's some weird edge case that a solution we didn't consider fails. You can see examples of the kinds of test cases you can expect in the previous years' data.
Is anyone facing problem in signing up for Facebook?
yeah me
Will the finals be online?
Yes
In the human track rules, unless I missed something, it is not prohibited to use directly AI, or something like in the AtCoder wording ("It is prohibited to directly input all or part of the information issued as problems into software"). Not sure it would be useful (yet...), but anyway does that mean it might be allowed?
Oh TIL https://atcoder.jp/posts/1247
I have signed up. Can I change the size of my T-shirt ? If yes how ?
You’ll enter your shirt size when it’s about to be shipped to you later in the contest season
Why is it so hard to create a new Facebook account?
After uploading a verification photograph, an appeal is automatically sent, and my account is disabled for no reason whatsoever within the next 24 hours.
can someone tell where can I practice past problems and submit them?
Here, you can select any of the past seasons, and any of the rounds and participate. You do have to be logged in to submit though.
Hi, what is the minimum age requirement?
18 years old
any rationale for this, or any chance this could be changed?
There's lots of scrutiny about showing the names of minors who competed on a publicly available scoreboard, and Meta didn't want to open themselves up to needing to defend doing so either in court or in public opinion. For what it's worth, this has always been in our Terms of Service.
Thanks for the clarification! I guess I've never read the ToS carefully enough in the past.
So it's ok for minors to have a Facebook account and be shown to the world but it's not ok to appear on a competition scoreboard?
You can tweak privacy settings when you create an account. You can’t with a leaderboard.
But you can't hide your name
You literally can
I didn't know that. But still meta can add option to hide name from standings
I guess they could fair enough
What's the difference between human and ai track?
In the human track, you write code to solve the problems yourself.
In the AI track, you write a code generation system before the contest to solve the problems itself.
I'm so excited about this year's contest!! Thanks for the post!!
Was registration opened for only one day?
It's still open. You just need to sign into your facebook account to be able to register, as it says on the site.
For human track, will there be only competitive programming type questions or other?
All tracks will have questions similar to the kinds of things you'd see in competitive programming contests. You can see our questions from previous years as an example of what you can expect.
Is it still open now or has it closed? I can't see any registration button for round 1, for practice round it is still open though...
I tried creating an account, but it got disabled citing it doesn't follow community standards, and that I can't request a review of the decision. So, is there anyway you can help with it?
Finally, a chance to get t-shirt :))
Excited !
Can anyone please tell me if the registration for meta hacker cup round 1 has started or is it already finished, I am able to register for practice round but there is no button to register for round 1
It has started and hasn't finished yet. You must log into Facebook to be able to register.
What Kind of questions can i expect in Round 1 ?
You can look at our questions from previous years to get an idea of what types of questions will appear in each round
registration has not started yet i think for main rounds!
If you register for the practice round, we'll automatically register you for Round 1 afterwards.
I cant update Email Address. I already updated my email at facebook account, but hacker cup site dosent get my email and I cant even write my email.
I just looked into the code that shows emails on the profile page and the Hacker Cup code doesn't even store your email. We're just reading from your Facebook user's primary email. So technically it seems like is/should be impossible for these to get out of sync with your Facebook email.
Can you please send me a direct message explaining why you think these are out of sync and what you did to update your facebook account's primary email?
https://codeforces.net/blog/entry/133675
I dont know how to put picture in comment, so I write at blog
i bet that problemset will have over 100k words
I just opened hacker cup website and got to know that I finished in top 2000 in round 2 last season. I missed the t-shirt claim process. Can I claim now?? Hopefully not!! :)
I have my email linked to my Facebook account, but it still doesn't appear on my profile.Could you please advise on what to do now ?
mine has not updated also ! Did your email updated ?
It seems like the issue hasn't been resolved yet. As SecondThread mentioned earlier, they get the email from Facebook’s primary email. However, I'm still unsure what the exact problem is. My email is public on Facebook, so there shouldn't be any issues with visibility.
i updated my email just 1 hour ago! Is it necessary to have an email to get a t-shirt ?
I guess the only way for communication regarding prizes is email.
Bro,if your problem get fixed then plz inform me also!
The contact info we use here is your primary facebook email. The easiest way to update this is in the facebook app if you go to Menu > Settings & Privacy > Settings > Search for "email" > Email, and then updating your primary email.
I have clicked on Email, but I don't see any option to update the primary email. All there is, is some notification settings.
can you update "Edit this in your Facebook settings" to the correct place?
I have successfully registered for the practice round, but when I attempt to access Round 1, it shows on the left side that I have not registered for this round. Could you please tell me with the registration process for Round 1?
You will be registered automatically if you registered for the practice round.
Can I register for it now ? Or am I late
You can still register.
I have solved 2 problems in the qualification round in Human track but I don't know if they are accepted,they are just showing a question mark there
How can I register, can you please guide me ?
During the contest, you won't know whether or not your submissions are correct. Now that the contest is over, you should be able to see the result.
What are the rules about AI for the human track? Can I ask for hints, solution, boilerplate code, debugging, refactoring, etc even though I’m participating in the human track? If not, how would that be enforced? Thank you.
The FAQ has been updated — https://www.facebook.com/codingcompetitions/hacker-cup/2024/round-1/faq
Yes, AI includes o1
Thanks for the answer!
MHC Round 1 conflicts with the 2024 ICPC North America Qualifier (NAQ) which happens at 11:00 — 16:00 PT on October 5th. Considering many universities in NA use NAQ for team selection for ICPC Regionals, will there be another bye system setup like there was last year? Not sure how this would work since the only round before round 1 is the qualification round.
And alternatively, can future MHC rounds happen on Sundays since it seems like there will always be ICPC conflicts on Saturdays in October/November every year.
SecondThread
We won't be offering alternatives to Round 1 this year. We hope to see you on the scoreboard; of note, you could likely use the first hour of the contest to qualify for round 2 even if you're participating in NAQ.
SecondThread since you are not offering alternatives to round 1 this year, can you at least change the requirement for qualifying to round 2 to be a points lower bound (like it has been for nearly 10 years)? I know last year the requirement was originally top 5000, but changed to 4 points due to system issues. But considering the NAQ conflict, 1 hour may not be enough to solve enough problems to secure top 5000 (especially if there are system issues in the first hour).
Nope, sorry. I believe in you though!
Hi, SecondThread. I am not able to submit for the older contests that I participated in. As opposed to a Submit for Practice button for the contests I didn't touch, I see a Submit on Home Page button now for the contests I've submitted once for, but there is no Submit button on home page.
Can you help please? Here are pictures. (I'm unrated, so I can only link them.)
UPDATE: They fixed it.
For me it has an option to "Download encrypted problems and input" but when I press it shows an error.
I'm seeing the same now. It wasn't there last night. Anyways, it's still not working for some older contests.
UPDATE: They fixed it.
Yep, should be fixed now. Sorry for breaking it!
No problem, thank you for fixing it :)
There is no countdown for the timer before it expires, How much time we have to run the solutions ?
In human track we have 6 minutes. Below the validate and submit button it shows the time remaining.
I hope I get a t-shirt this time!!
The input files in the HackerCup are quite large in size. VSCode crashes if I run my source code with the large input file and there is no output. Does anyone know how to resolve this ? Also tried using Sublime but didn't help much.
Consider increasing your stack size https://nor-blog.codeberg.page/posts/2023-09-25-increase-stack-size/
SecondThread Do the problems in the Practice Round have a TIME LIMIT? I couldn't find any info related to this on the contest platform and after submitting the solution to a problem, we can't see the judgement of our submission. If yes, how to know if it is 1 sec or 2 sec or 4 sec?
There is no official TL because the solutions are not run by the system.
You just need to submit before the 6-minute timer expires. Considering you need a minute to download the input and upload the output, the TL is somewhere around 300 seconds.
If it's helpful, all of our judge solutions run in a few seconds to all problems on a modest laptop
But is it ok to submit a solution that takes a minute for example?
Yeah, if it takes less than like 5 minutes, there's no way we're going to DQ you.
How does the round system work? Is each round independent and just for the qualification of next round. Or There is some accumulation of results of each round (like prefix sum) that is taken into account for next round?
Each round is independent, as mentioned in the contest page.
Why do I have to go through such a long and convoluted process to just upload a submission? This is annoying
Post contest discuss stream for practice round
Btw how is checker of Fall in Line implemented?
It's less exciting than you'd think. When we generated the solutions, we naively found the best lines and counted how many points were on it. The checker is given the optimal answer, so it doesn't have to calculate it on the fly, it just checks if you're within x and 2x the number it is given.
In Problem 3 Fall in Line (very nice), luckily for me I think the trivial case with 3 ants not in line was not in the test cases. My code output is 3 (n instead of the smarter n-2) — correct answers are 1 or 2. I realized after submitting and I was almost sure it would have ended up in WA. This year favourable test cases :D
In this case any pair of 2 distinct points $$$P_i, P_j$$$ is a "witness" for a line with $$$p==2>=3/2==n/2$$$ points lying on that line. Maybe You've just rounded $$$n/2$$$ incorrectly while doing the comparison $$$p ?>=? n/2$$$.
Anyways, problem C was a real "little delight"! ^_^
Getting random points 3 by 3 to find clues for possible lines with >n/2 points. As there aren't 3 points aligned, it outputs n. It always works, except with n=3. Outputing n-2 it would have always worked.
And yes, C and D2.
Happy to hear you liked it!
I am surprised that intended solution for D2 is AVL/Splay/Treap instead of this geniosity
Mine is very similar (I do not know splay/treap):
Can you please explain the idea behind your D2 solution? Thanks.
Assuming you already solved D1 and know that we only need to find the final positions of the stones:
Now watch what happens when we throw a stone:
--X-XX----Xwe throw a stone with $$$E_i=5$$$.-X-XX--X--XCan you please explain your D2 solution?
Wow that's brilliant. Wondering how this works though, would love to know the intuition behind it
hey SecondThread , in the practice round my ranking in my country is not showing but it is showing in global , in my profile and in the certificate . what is wrong ?
If anyone knows the answers to these queries, please comment.
Why does it matter how they check our solutions, if your output.txt is correct, it’s correct no matter how they check it.
Please answer other questions too
https://www.facebook.com/codingcompetitions/hacker-cup/2024/practice-round
That is the only round where he could prevail, LOL