antontrygubO_o's blog

Best contest I have participated in
By antontrygubO_o, history, 6 years ago, In English

Yesterday I saw the announcement of the contest Code Mutants on Codeforces, it said contest will take place today (19th February). I went through the announcement, it said:

"Top 3 contestants will be rewarded with 250 Laddus!! from CodeChef.Some of the top contestants will be selected for onsite round where prizes worth 10,000 INR are waiting for you!!"

I thought: "Cool! I definitely should try it, I feel inspired!"

So I felt inspired and went to the CodeChef. In announcement there, I saw the following:

Hoping to get to onsite, I filled in this form!

Then, the contest started. Tasks turned out to be very interesting! Even more impressive was innovative Tex formatting:

After I solved the first task, I tried to submit it and clicked Submit. However, it was testing too long. "Maybe it's TL?" — I asked myself. After it was testing for 5 more minutes, I dropped that idea.

That was kinda strange. I went to my submissions of that problem and discovered that I had no submission for it. Moreover, after I tried to send the solution 5 more times, I still had no submission for it. However, after I got too nervous, I got the following message from Codechef:

So it was receiving my submissions, just wasn't displaying them anywhere. Still happy about the great contest, I went to the contest page and saw that tasks were so hard that nobody managed to solve a single problem!

However, it turned out that some solutions still were tested, though not displayed there. I went to the scoreboard and saw that somebody managed to submit a few problems. However, there were some cheaters, who, as their penalty indicates, submitted problems even before the contest started.

It got really suspicious. I went to the announcements, expecting to see the message telling about technical issues, but here is what I saw:

Nice! That's exactly what would help me now.

However, later they acknowledged that they experience some technical issues:

Anyway, I really enjoyed the contest! I have never laughed so much during the actual online competition. Tell about the contests that you enjoyed!

Thanks for attention

P.S. I didn't want to imply anything bad about the problem setters or to express any disrespect to organisers: they still have done a lot of work. Just wanted to share the best contest of my life impressions!

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6 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +52 Vote: I do not like it

Who else have read the whole blog with full interest because of the title ? :p

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    6 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Me. It was quite hilarious. XD

    Now I think it was good that I didn't participate in the above-mentioned contest. Skipping my dinner because of something like that would really have been annoying.

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6 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +29 Vote: I do not like it

I guess it is more of CodeChef issue.Because currently even the practice questions of codechef shows the same technical error.

During contest I called the codechef officials but they didn't respond properly.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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    6 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

    Yeah, I noticed glitches with site few hours before the contest.

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6 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it

As far as I understand, this codechef bug with negative time penalty happens when somebody's solution is already tested and accepted, but scoreboard wasn't reloaded. Btw, problems are no so bad as for codechef :) Also, there are very many funny contest like this one on this platform)

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6 years ago, # |
← Rev. 3   Vote: I like it +32 Vote: I do not like it

That negative time is what I would expect from a messed up calculation with a UNIX timestamp. Perhaps the submission times are interpreted as unix time 0 (or NULL). E.g. the current time when writing this is 1550601422, which is 430722:37:02. Minus sign from calculating submission time - contest start where submission time = 0.

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6 years ago, # |
← Rev. 3   Vote: I like it +19 Vote: I do not like it

So it seems that all these problems occurred because you didn't resubmit your google form? :/

I actually looked at the contest dashboard now. Isn't one of the problems (LIMF) missing out there?

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    6 years ago, # ^ |
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    I think organizers removed it because it is well-known problem (even in such constraints) and it was possible to google ready solution.

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    6 years ago, # ^ |
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    Yes, problem LIMF suddenly disappered after contest ended. Also, I suppose this is something not okay with problem PIT, because nobody solved it (but many people tried). And if I understand statement correctly, it is easy and non hard-to-implement problem.

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6 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

A warning: I just noticed the contest still seems to be running.

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