Just a few hours ago, The 2021 ICPC Asia Regionals Online Contest (I) was held on https://pintia.cn/. This contest(and the next on 26th) will determine the WHOLE Asia-East Division‘s quota. And how fantastic(according to some coaches) of these problems in this online contest? I upload the statement on GDrive and you can preread it here: aec-online-i-2021.pdf
I should clarify something here: This contest doesn't have a clarification function, and some problems are from Huawei. Guess which they are!
After Yinchuan Site's cheating, Shenyang Site's problem leaking, this is the third(maybe?) ridiculous and disgusting thing that happened in EC Division this year. I don't know what's organizer's purpose is, but our participants' enthusiasm and determination of Competitive Programming is not something you can trample.
I guess maybe the main reason is the organizers want to please the sponsor -- Huawei. So these problems are been prepared by the employees of Huawei who used to be a contestant in comptetive programming but can only prepare some old style and low quality problems now.
I think it is better for Huawei to invite some truely top-ranked contestant who is still on contest in last five years to help the problem-preparing team.
I read some chat records of coaches(one of them is PTA's admin, she provided the PTA platform for this contest. ) and they can be divided into 3 parts. Most coaches didn't participate in any form of CP, so they can only judge contests' quality by observing ranklist. Having 8 very easy problems, the ranklist of course looks pretty good. The second one is the host of these online contests, who act like they did nothing wrong and ask participants don't blame them too much. The last one is those who know how to judge a contest's quality, unfortunately, they don't have the power to change this silly situation. As for participants? No one cares about participants. So Huawei maybe even don't know they made a bullshit contest——most coaches' (especially those who have leading voices) feedback is positive.
All I talk about above is for one thing: If ICPC is still ruled by those people who never get one simple thing done, this suck kind of contest will only appear more and more. Compare this online contest to CCPC's, I think this one's effect is worse. CCPC at least unrated their trash so your quota won't be affected. But ICPC still makes it rated and even doesn't have any announcement for it. It's not just one sponsor's fault but the whole contest system is rotted from the root.
As nocriz once said, "ICPC is just a joke"
Actually, we don't care who is the sponsor, or where are the problems from. What we worry about is that ICPC East-Asia is getting more and more disappointing.
Let HUAWEI be sponsor? That's OK.
Let HUAWEI offer the problems? That's OK.
But the quality of the problems is so low that no one can live with it. YinChuan, ShenYang, and this online contest, they all hapen this year. Does this mean ICPC East-Asia is worse than ever and will get more "disgusting"?
I'm very confused.
IS IT VERY DIFFICULT TO EXPRESS THE MEANING WITH LESS WORDS?
IS IT VERY DIFFICULT TO WRITE ALL THE RANGES OF ELEMENTS?
IS IT VERY DIFFICULT TO MAKE SURE THE DATA MATCHS THE PROBLEM?(in problem B)
IS IT VERY DIFFICULT TO DESCRIBE HOW DOES THE INPUT LOOKS LIKE?
Ok, the contest is bad, but why is it important?
What do you mean?
To participant in official (online or onsite) regional contests, teams should get lower ranks in these two online qualification contests. Shanghai Site's quota allocation rule is here but others are still not clear. For Shanghai Site (if it's onsite), schools ranked 1-50 will receive 2 quotas, 51-130 will receive 1 quota.
So all ICPC Asia-EC teams participate in this contest, and their regional qualification is decided by the result of this (and another) contest? Was it always been like this?
Yes, but this year's qualification rule is not the same as before. Last year due to COVID-19, all regionals hold in 2020 are online and all schools in qualification rounds can get 4 quotas. Before 2020, each site will have its individual qualification round but one person can only participate in two of them.