CodingKnight's blog

About HackerEarth September Circuit '21 Long-Time Contest
By CodingKnight, 3 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces,

I am a 56-year old life-long learner and computer-programming lover with PhD degree in Electronics and Electrical Communications Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, and with research interest in VLSI CAD algorithms, computer architecture, digital signal and image processing. I joined Codeforces five years ago to encourage my son during his first year in college, and I participate almost regularly in long-time competitive programming challenges as time permits.

I participated last week in HackerEarth September Circuits '21 Long-Time Contest that ended yesterday, and I reached the 4th rank on the Leaderboard of the Contest. The approximate problem in the Contest was a variant to the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). To my surprise, the first runner-up commented about four days ago that the checker program of this problem was broken and it accepted invalid solutions. As such, only two contestants managed to write wrong solutions that exploited the incorrectness of the checker in getting the highest possible score, while other contestants including me who wrote correct solutions assuming that the checker program would reject invalid solutions did not reach 1% of the score of the wrong solutions.

I am writing this blog to urge the HackerEarth team whose members announce in Codeforces invitations to regular HackerEarth Contests to review thoroughly the checker programs of the problems posted in its regular contests. The issue of broken checker took place several times in the past few months Circuits long-time Contests without any apology and without any announcement that corrective procedure would be pursued to be more sure that future contests do not include broken checker programs.

Thanks in advance for the constructive feedback and response.

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Comments Comments (8)
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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -81 Vote: I do not like it

56?! You're already done with life. Let go, it's over, no body listens to old folks. Now allow me to leave.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +34 Vote: I do not like it

    you are a toxic person.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +27 Vote: I do not like it

    Don't be a dick, the blog is justified.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 4   Vote: I like it +38 Vote: I do not like it

    I am not sure what is the issue with someone in the sixth decade of his life participating in competitive programming contest. To my humble knowledge, there is no age-limit to learning and to writing computer programs and participating in competitive programming contests.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +17 Vote: I do not like it

    Tell the same thing to your dad who is working his ass off to pay the college fees of a retard like you.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +22 Vote: I do not like it

Yeah unfortunately something goes wrong with these contests almost every month (I rant in my detail at the end of this post). The HackerEarth team never responds to these issues during the contest either. Eventually I just gave up competing on that site.

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

    Thanks for sharing the link to the interesting blog, Max Zhang. It was worthwhile to read it.

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

Lol, I remember one long contest when I decided to participate randomly, and the scoring was based on how small your answer was (more points for smaller answers, but constrained to be less than 100 digits long), whereas there were cases where the best possible answer is 300ish digits long..

and the top submissions were ofc people who submitted something like -1 and got 100 points :)

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