Thanks for pointing it out, It's like chess, even though engines are much stronger and some people cheat to gain rating points online but it didn't stop genuine players to stop playing. They still play for love of the game.

The author expresses frustration with the growing concern over AI's impact on competitive programming, arguing that the focus should be on the enjoyment of problem-solving rather than obsessing over ratings or cheating. They criticize the notion that competition problems should be made unsolvable by AI, emphasizing that the purpose of competitive programming is fun for humans. The author believes that cheating and the fear of AI are overshadowing the community's original intent of enjoying the activity. They urge the community to focus less on negatives like cheating and AI and more on the fun of the sport.

Obviously it's easy for you to say, that you are doing this for fun because at your level cheaters dont affect you at all (or at least not significantly enough to notice). It's honestly disheartening to solve 3 problems in Div2 and get top 4k rank and negative delta, whereas a around a year ago when I started CP and solved 3 problems in Div2 got 2k rank and +100. You know what? I also am doing it for fun. But some people want to see progress in their problem solving (as I want) which is noticable by improving one's codeforces rating, but unfortunately even though I have noticed that my problem solving skills are better (can solve 1600-1900 problems more often) than a year ago I have a lower rating than at the start of this year, because of the whole cheating affair.

in your blogs / comments you look at people as if everybody is like you , its false i dont enjoy solving problems , i dont like being stuck on a constructive problem for more than 30 seconds the only reason i do cp is because i like the competitive side of it the same reason i would play a game after 8k+ hours do you think i really enjoy it ? no i just like being competitive so if for you u do cp because its fun i agree ai doesnt have a big impact on you but for me i like to measure my performance compete with others and possibly beat some people and achieve afew goals all of which AI and cheaters effect by not more than 3-5% but its still a chance the same reason video game companies pay millions of dollars on anti cheats even tho in most of them cheaters dont affect the player base specially PVE , codeforces has to do its best , again not everybody is similar to you and iam actually surprised you still enjoy cp , in most of the stuff i love doing after nearly 4-5k hours (which is probably less than 20% of what u spent on cp) i get bored and do them less than 2 hours a week and u are here not missing a single contest honestly credits to you

edit : iam no superhuman that can get good at something i dont like and iam not saying i dont like cp i just dont enjoy it the way i enjoy other things which i think one of the reasons i suck at cp , sitll excuses tho

Please understand that the definition of fun is different for different people. If, for some people, fun means getting a good rank and having a good rating -- then regardless of what you say AI IS ruining competitive programming for them.

And if you think their definition of fun should match yours, then I don't know what to say

my english is not that good but "A lock on the door is meant to stop honest people from being tempted, else it's not hard for a thief to break it." may codeforces do this so honest people don't be gready, and i also fully support you view that we shoulde do cp for fun as a sport

What is the point of "competitive" programming then?

Iam down mr Um_nik

Instead of talking about AI, let's have the conversation we are not ready for.

Human psychology prevents having contests like this. I've seen this multiple times. You can have the most motivated people who earnestly enjoy problem solving and do competitive programming for fun. If you give them an online judge, a problem and tell them "solving in $$$O(n^2)$$$ with bitsets doesn't count", there will always be some fraction of people who will inexplicably submit $$$O(n^2)$$$ with bitsets.

It's just taking the path of the least resistance. Some people will submit to the temptation to see the green Accepted. And again, I'm talking about a very different demographic from greens who want to put "1600 on Codeforces" in their resume.

I think cheating might become fun in some (rare) scenarios like stress testing.

By having decided to stress test, you have already committed to just give up on trying to find a counterexample on your own. The result you expect is that after you do a bit of menial work, the computer pops up with a case where your solution fails (or confirms it didn't find one).

Consider the two cases:

• You spend a few minutes writing the test generator and the brute force. This is time not spent actually problem solving.
• You press a button, and the AI generates a brute force solution, test generator and informs you of a case where your solution fails. You immediately resume problem solving with this new information.

I think when maximizing fun, the optimal approach would be either to never resort to stress testing OR to use AI for that. Would it ever be more fun to actually do the stress testing yourself if you knew that AI could've done it for you?

(I'm only trying to argue that it's possible for cheating to be more fun than not cheating in some scenarios. I don't think this in particular is a big deal or anything that would significantly change contest results.)

it is funny to see that on every reload of the page the upvote count of the blog goes either down or up

I saw it jump from 82 to 87, then to 81, then to 85, then to 83 again.

Agree. Just give them 1600 and kick them out, they are not wanted here.

I think you simply don't "feel" it because you're on the top level where AI can't get right now. Sooner or later it will get even there and you will see the problem. When people even with the rating 2700 who want to be 3000 will be generating ideas to solve the most difficult problems ;-)

But who cares about low-level participants, right?

I believe thinking with AI is also a skill too which is going to be needed more and more these days.

Either CP will become a contest for this type of thinking or a whole competition will be created around it (like ACP or whatever).

BTW, Um_nik, I want to know your opinion on this:

The best AI by openAI could get to 1800 but also IOI gold, why is this happening?

Holy shit this guy speaks nothing but the truth

After watching it, I felt very moved. Although my competition results weren't very good, thank you for helping me regain the passion and enjoyment I initially had when I started competitive programming.

just play cp like chess, and enjoy it as a sport

I totally agree with you that solving problems is fun and AI won't ruin that fun, however contests aren't just solving problems. Before continuing, let's totally ignore the people who do competitive programming for their resume or similar reasons since I also think that's ridiculous, so we assume that everyone here likes solving problems.

I think a lot of people get a kick from participating in contests, performing well and "beating" people they couldn't previously etc.—i.e. they enjoy the competitive nature of the sport. If an AI can outperform $$$X\%$$$ of the participants then you basically ruin the competitiveness between them. Why would anyone belonging to that $$$X\%$$$ participate in contests then? Even if they liked solving problems they would just upsolve afterwards. Now the real problem is that I'm not sure if we could have weekly contests etc. if $$$X\%$$$ of the people stop participating in contests.

Disclaimer: I don't think we are at the point where we have to worry about the sustainability of competitive programming but I genuinely believe it's something worth wondering about if we consider the possibility of AI actually performing better than a huge chunk of the people participating in contests.

People who solve problems for fun >> People who solve problems for getting into faang

People say you become expert in programming when you become expert on codeforces.

time to question that with interference of ai.

maybe we need to raise the bar higher.

I agree that CP is fun and we should not be bothered about cheating, but then what is the point of having a rating system?

We, as Competitive Programmers, can just enjoy the contests without being bothered by ratings. But Codeforces, as a platform, has a rating system and they should be concerned about making sure the ratings the participants get are legit. They should be concerned that the rated contests conducted on their platform have no unethical activity. And we, as a community, can share/discuss some ideas on how to reduce these activities.

I have posted this in the discussion about the AI rules but I think it is important for people to know, I would create blog but I don't think people would care, anyways there's a lot of misinformation about LLMs and their capabilities (a lot of the big AI players are just selling snake oil). Take this into consideration when thinking LLMs can reach some ranks.

There is no evidence that current large language models (LLMs) can solve problems that they have not been directly trained on. Systems like AlphaCode are not accessible to regular users, and their true capabilities remain unclear. Techniques like Chain of Thought (COT) do not enable models to "think" in a human sense; they merely rewrite the input text to try to fit it within the training data distribution.

For example, LLMs struggle with basic arithmetic. If they provide a correct answer, it is because they have been specifically trained on that sum. To break the model, and get a wrong answer, you just need to add more numbers to the equation.

If you use a COT technique to break down a sum, such as:

123456 + 123456 + 123456

to something like

  1 2 3 4 5 6  
+ 1 2 3 4 5 6
--------------

the model only needs to identify pairs of digits, like (6, 6 -> 2) and (5, 5 -> 0) (technically pairs of these as you need to take into account the carry). However, this does not mean that LLMs can reliably add numbers, as their probabilistic nature often leads to incorrect answers. For more details, you can watch this presentation at https://youtu.be/d_bdU3LsLzE?t=1726 (the timestamp corresponds to the slide where this is discussed).

I also mentioned that in order to clear the myths of what LLMs can and can't do it would be interesting to create an official account that uses an LLM to compete in the contests to let people know what the real capabilities of the models are and have data to study possible cheating patterns.

Unfathomably based opinion lol

In fact I think competitive programming platforms should have an option for all participants before each contest that says "I am a pussy and does not actually want to do competitive programming; I am only here for the rating. Therefore, I would like to take the performance of [insert best AI model here] as my own for this contest and relinquish my opportunity to solve the problems and have fun, so that I won't ruin it for other people".

On a more serious note, I think we have enough time to deal with AI before some Stockfish level model happens. In chess, no one really cared about chess engines until they touched the highest level of human play with Deep Blue, even though they cracked Master level more than 2 decades prior. Even now that computer chess far exceeds human abilities, they still fail to produce engines that play "human-like", meaning that cheating in chess is oftentimes painfully obvious. If tomorrow a model that can solve every 3000-rated problem in the world with some 2000 lines monstrosity suddenly appeared, I would marvel at that feat of technology, but I doubt the competitive programming world would be "rocked" or "destroyed" because of it.

My problems are mainly for those who want to solve genuinely, but anyone can feel free to slap their AI model on it. Just like chess puzzles.

Is it to get to 1600 rating and put it on the resume?

Radical thought experiment, don't take this too seriously.

Remove all ranks below Candidate Master. Do not publicly show any rating below 1900. Treat only Div. 1 rounds as true competitions, and treat all lower divisions as mere qualifications to Div. 1.

I think competitive programming ability is some proxy for competence. Thats why hiring process involves something similar. And even with internet access freely, I cannot beat the performance of a LGM. This is cool and serves as motivation to improve and even as a source of respect: from all the tools and things on the earth, the human brain is the best at this particular activity, and there is no way around it.

I dont think we should limit ourselves. We should use the best tools and strive to be the as good as possible. And even with AI, for now at least, I cannot beat or have a performance similar to a LGM.

The whole “we do it for fun” is cute and all, but you Um_nik are of course a very competitive person. If AI is good enough to the point where the performance of someone assisted by it is indistinguishable from a top contestant, we should stop having rating or prizes. And only do it for “fun”. For now the competition still lives, humans are better than AIs. Lets enjoy while our dominance lasts :)

Every single time Um_nik pops up he gives us a banger.

Um_nik is right.

I think that the author is quite right because the AI has make the competition unfair and boring

It is quite elitist to say just because you're doing it for fun of problem solving everyone else should as well or else leave. Competitive programming is neither software engineering nor academia but it is educational and can moderately help with both. From the AI vs contest perspective a big part of the fun is the competition and ranking for many people (at least me), no different than why many like any other sport.

The difference between sports and chess vs competitive programming is that almost all contests are online making it impossible to prevent cheating in its current format if AI reaches that level. This has potential (not necessarily, chess.com is still fine I think) to get rid of any fun from the competitive perspective, which is at least a valid concern.

We should absolutely get rid of problems like the one you mentioned and had a typo "we collectively agree to be one of the best worst div2A" (I hate that blog, only sampled from a bunch of minimize algorithm circle jerkers). Those problems for sure make it no fun for me and many others.

Hm, I think it is not as easy as you argue. I absolutely agree with you that one should not cheat, and that solving problems is meant to be fun. But what is fun?

In Codeforces rounds, one is allowed to use the Internet, and this can be fun. (Isn't it? One might have heard of a concept but doesn't really remember it, so they want to refresh their knowledge; one copies an algorithm they don't have in their prewritten library; one searches cppreference to see how some new STL feature works... Well, it seems that can be fun.) Then AI appears on the scene, and some time later, the default browser response will come from AI. It will be fun; you will just receive information in a more compact and readable format. But it also enhances your performance, and what does your conscience allow or disallow you to ask? The AI can also tell you, for example, which types of queries are answered by a min kinetic segment tree. I don't know, but I can follow a link and find out. Or I can ask the AI and learn it faster. And probably it will respond, "No, it doesn't included in the default interface, but it can be easily done with..."

There are also some AI helpers, like extensions for IDEs. I don't use any, but I do use auto-completion. Sooner or later, it might become very widespread and be included by default in some fancy editors like CLion. The AI saying, "This place is likely wrong," is similar to a compiler warning but much stronger. Why and do should I switch it off if it becomes a default feature of an editor?

TL;DR: I don't think the impact of AI is significant now, provided you don't cheat, but in the future, it might become a real problem even for those who just want to solve problems.

See.. ratings are a very accurate measure of whether you've actually gotten better at competitve programming or not. Its feedback. With everyone using AI even if i'm doing all the right things and i'm improving, i wouldn't know that. Sure CP is fun. But so is improvement. And i don't trust myself to make judgements like: Hey even tho my rating hasn't changed in a lot of time i'm still actually getting better at solving problems. That's the only reason i'm worried about AI in the CP scene.

Never used cheats, AI, and everything possible, but numbers just motivated me asf. Now I've read your statement — thanks, Umnik. I'm going to get the f**k out of this platform.

I think that problems with fixed time complexity are only good as theoretical math problems, since there is no need to write some asymptotically better solution that would start working better than bitsets only when $$$n \ge 2^{1000}$$$

First they came for the newbies, and I did not speak out — because I was not a newbie.

Then they came for the pupils, and I did not speak out — because I was not a pupil.

Then they came for the experts, and I did not speak out — because I was not an expert.

Then they came for the LGM's and there was no one left to speak for me.

"solving math problems with a computer" is a good one tho

It's all fun and games until Arnold Schwarzenegger walks into the IOI finals

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree and I think my objection has merit even though I stopped competing years ago and weren't especially good in my "prime" either. If only thing that mattered were solving problems there wouldn't be competitions at all. Also, you can't really convince me that it doesn't feel good when you beat tourist or when you were ranked number 1 on the leaderboard. Similarly it's natural that even lower rated coders wants to be in let's say top 10000 or top 1000 users, however if we get to the situation when a random person from the street can get a better result, competition becomes pointless for thousands of users. Sure, they can still enjoy problems, but then there's no point in competing at least not for a year or two for them.

regarding the "You are not ready for this conversation" part: there's been once or twice where I thought I had a nlogn but I had a bug making it n^2 while still correct. and you're n<=100 idea wouldn't have caught it

I wonder why you censor the word fuck

I agree with you on the point that AI should not influence problem setting. I think that a 'good' problem is defined by how much fun participants have in solving a problem instead of how effective that problem is in filtering out lower rated participants. If we start avoiding setting problems that AI can solve then eventually we'll reach a point where no problem is a suitable problem as AI would be solving pretty much everything.

Although I believe there is some truth true what people say about the 'death of online CP', I believe that the rating system adds a unique dimension to solving problems. Aside from people who do CP for jobs, even among people who genuinely enjoy solving problems, a lot of people also do CP in the hopes of something like 'I want to be a grandmaster someday'. I also enjoy solving problems a lot but somewhere inside I also have a dream of being red someday. That thing might completely go away, and CF might become another online judge like Timus or Uva. I would still enjoy solving problems the same way even if AI can perform better than me, but it is a little sad to imagine that I will have to give up on whatever rating dreams that I had.

Don't panic, people still play chess, and will do CP as well.

Can we create problems that AIs are unable to solve? Maybe it's true if the problem is easy for human perception (taken from real life, having a natural statement) but difficult for rephrasing in mathematical terms.

It's called "competitive" programming. We don't do Codeforces just because it is "fun" to solve problems. We like beating other people and achieving good rank. No one wants to lose rating just because they were moral enough not to cheat. The moment AI becomes LGM rated we won't be able to trust rank anymore. Especially because cheating with AI will be just few clicks away and there is absolutely no way to detect that. You're arrogant to call people crazy for noticing this. You just don't understand the problem. Codeforces doesn't exist just as a platform to allow people to solve problems. It is a platform where people can compare their skill with others. If you want to solve problems why do it in contests and not offline where you can choose difficulty and solve them anytime you choose. You just don't understand why it is fun for you and are crying about it.

This is what we call: toxic positivity. That we ignore problems because we wish to have fun. Toxic positivity is bad.

Why do you care?

Why do you not care? Cheaters rage rampant. You are saying this: New York is a great city! Rent is highest in all of U.S.A, homelessness rates high, has very cut-throat competition, but it is overall a great city with many opportunities, has many tourists, and is the one of the most urban city (if not most) in all America! Therefore ignore the problems of the city!

Which a) you are saying because you are high rated to not be affected by cheaters and b) you do not care about the bottom. Shame on such people! I do urge you to change your viewpoints.

?

People come to codeforces because of :

A) They have some kind of goal as a job, a university in which a rating can help

B) For fun .

(Of course, the number of people in group A will be greater than B) The most interesting codeforces is a platform where people compete who will pass the most tasks, people come to get the practice of "competition", if you want to solve problems for fun, then there are other platforms that are only aimed at this.(just my opinion)

Why are you doing competitive programming?

Most ordinary people (like me) may just like to compete, as the name CP suggests, and for most people, a competition is only fun in a relatively fair environment. Of course, the competition is still fair for the talented/hard-working people on the top (like Um_nik), but it's reasonable for ordinary people to be concerned. There is a reason why this became an issue of focus after the recent post of OpenAI: the new model is suddenly capable of ruining the competitive integrity for a much larger proportion of people.

This is similar to playing many online PvP games(DotA/CS/League/you name it). Sure, there are pro players who are able to take pure enjoyments from practicing and improving (resembling the 3K+ Gods on CF), and then there are hackers who want to get some fulfilment that they are desperately lacking in their real lives. But in the end, most people are in between, and are just playing for fun; but there is no fun in playing against hackers or smurfs (people who create new accounts for deliberate uneven matches). There's a interesting resemblance that most pro players care very little about hackers and smurfs as well (because they would dominate them regardless).

CP has never been a sanctuary where everyone takes enjoyment purely from solving problems. If that is the case, they could have just go and solve the existing archive of problems (in which there are many great ones) instead of taking part in live contests. The competitive nature of CP is built in to its name itself and cannot be denied.

I wish to be better at programming simpliciter. That is why I log on here. If AI can solve problems here then we can find better ways to detect it or we can change the problems so the AI cannot solve them.

I largely agree with the main point of the blog — but I'm curious, would you be fine with dropping from rank 10 on CF to let's say rank 200, knowing most of the people above you are cheating, but not necessarily knowing who exactly, and wouldn't it ruin your overall experience (e.g. when reading blogs and not being able to understand the person's real rating)? Would you be fine with never qualifying for an on-site competition because of cheaters?

I am not saying either will necessarily happen, but I do think that this invention may cause some harm and demoralize people, especially for someone younger who has never been to an on-site but is good enough to qualify right now. And it looks like contests with any material prizes will indeed need to find ways to address the AI cheating concerns — no company is interested in giving money to random unqualified cheaters on the internet

For me personally, it may just be the fear that my efforts will be belittled and deemed worthless. The emergence of AI has significantly lowered the difficulty and threshold for achieving a 1600 rating. While reaching this score might require a lot of time and practice, I am not a particularly clever player， I am willing to invest a lot of effort and time into this competition. I not only enjoy the fun of solving problems, but I also appreciate the process of seeing my rating improve in quantifiable terms. Perhaps when a 1600 rating becomes a topic of conversation, people might say things like, 'Don’t just look at his rating of 1600; it could just be because of AI.' This person has no real skill, or something similar, as if to say, 'It’s just a 1600 rating; AI can easily boost it.' When such discussions and sentiments spread, it will be really difficult for me, as it feels like the effort I put in is being trampled on. I do admit that even before AI, there were many ways for people to cheat, which could help you reach a higher rank. However, when I think about how AI has greatly lowered the threshold for cheating and shifted the attitude towards discussions about ratings, it can be quite disheartening. Indeed, we cannot stop how a technology is used, but I still hope that AI technology can greatly assist in self-learning effects. I enjoy the joy of solving problems and am committed to it!

I love problem solving. I do it for fun. Even though I'm not very good at this. But it's true that positive delta makes me happy and negative delta makes me a little sad. I think this is the fun of sport. If people start cheating, it will be a little disappointing for beginners like us. I'm not against AI. We do CP to improve our skills, not AI skills. I think these AI companies should have some kind of watermark in their codes for the sake of programming. So that people can't blindly cheat on contests. I think it will be helpful. This is just my feelings about AI and cheating.

my brain is broken