FBI's blog

By FBI, 2 years ago, In English

Last 2 or 3 contests solutions are being leaked in the internet,and because of that many "smart people",that have no clue how to solve something,are being carried up in the tournament table.Is this fair? I think no,but leave your opinion in comments.

edit: today A,B,C and D were leaked,so I think it affected almost every rated participant

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2 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +146 Vote: I do not like it

It's not the last 2 or 3 contests, it's more like the last 200 contests.

Personally I don't care much about it since most people that cheat will still get worse rank than me so gitgud ;)

It's obviously not fair, but how exactly would you want to solve this problem? Making copy detection work better is not trivial. I would start by banning people that cheat repeatedly instead of just skipping their participation, but would that work?

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I really don't know,maybe yeah,banning after cheating like 3-4 times.But I think that even that will not solve this problem,people need to understand that cheating doesn't make you smarter,it just approves that you can't manage on your own,without help. Also one question for you,how do I pass this "wall" of being an expert,what are the important topics that i have to learn?

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      Banning could work because, imagine gaining expert+ after cheating and then after banning, you start at level $$$0$$$ again.

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        2 years ago, # ^ |
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        I mean,look at fake accounts that are solving div3,div4,all of them are just "stealing" rating that someone else could have gained

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          2 years ago, # ^ |
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          In theory alts aren't allowed but I think that cf admins gave up on enforcing that. I know of one case of a high profile contestant making an alt and receiving a message to stop using that account to smurf otherwise that person would get banned, but I haven't heard of anything like that ever since.

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            2 years ago, # ^ |
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            Dunno,almost every div3,div4 I see accounts that were registered like 2-3 days ago and are solving 1600+ tasks

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      banning after cheating like 3-4 times

      If it's a true cheating (not plag check false positive or somebody's mistake with online IDE) — the person should be banned immediately after the 1 case.

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        2 years ago, # ^ |
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        How do you prove that? How many people who say the online IDE line were really using online IDEs and accidentally had his code leaked? Many cheaters aren't that dumb to admit to cheating.

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          2 years ago, # ^ |
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          That's a separate question. My comment was more on conceptual side of a thing.

          But as you already asked I would consider amount of same codes and the bigger it is — more likely that solution was leaked intentionally in a public place (telegram group/youtube channel/etc). I don't thing that a lot of participants are scanning online IDEs non-stop during the competition.

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        2 years ago, # ^ |
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        Speaking of the online IDE excuse, I would actually be very surprised if there was actually one genuine honest case of the online IDE leak.

        It's really not likely for somebody to be able to find some code from ideone that they had no foreknowledge about, that so conveniently happens to be a solution (and a correct one, at that) for the very same contest that they are currently participating in. I just don't see this as a realistic possibility, and I've heard this ridiculous online IDE excuse so many times that I'm pretty sure it is actually just a well-established excuse in certain communities to try to get away with deliberate cheating.

        There may be an extremely small number of legitimate scenarios (so I understand giving the benefit of the doubt and not outright banning), but in general, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those involve actual deliberate cheating.

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          2 years ago, # ^ |
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          It actually was happening. And there definitely were a lot of genuine honest cases. Heck, it happened to me once maybe 4 years ago or so and I indeed was surprised that somebody managed to find and submit my public ideone code. But I just remembered that ideone at some point made codes private by default (initially, it wasn't the case) so I agree that now it should be very rare and much more suspicious comparing to the past.

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            2 years ago, # ^ |
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            Wait, do you mean that, in the past, ideone would automatically make your code public (e.g., it would appear in the "Recent Codes") if you save it? I wasn't aware of this, but in any case, I was more referring to the recent state, where it's very unlikely for someone's code to be leaked through ideone with no actual intent of dishonesty. There have been a lot of claims that their skipped submissions were due to ideone, and while there might be a few legitimate ones, I'm quite sure the majority of them are false excuses (that seems to be quite a well-known one too).

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              2 years ago, # ^ |
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              Exactly. So if you forgot to make it private — it was made public by default and published in "Recent Codes" right after saving/compilation.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I agree with you, in the end just get good enough that cheaters don't affect your performance. That's the only plausible solution for now

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2 years ago, # |
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In my opinion , if somehow you managed to do A,B in starting 25 minutes , u did not feel any (large) effect of cheating on ur rating. so be focussed and upsolve the problems

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    today A,B,C,D were leaked,soo not really,leaking affected almost everybody who solved 3-4 tasks

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      definately if this much number of questions leaked then it is matter for concern..

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2 years ago, # |
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Great consistency dude

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2 years ago, # |
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I think we should have a stronger punishment on the leaker than the usual cheaters, this makes sense in a utilitarian way (A single leaker causes a greater loss to the innocent people than probably a few dozen cheaters.)

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    I don't think that we can find the leakers in the first place. And we most probably cannot punish them either, even if we get proofs.

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      On a relatively recent contest, a leaker was found (SecondPractice). I think we need to punish strongly the ones that have been found at least, so that the punishment has some effect on prevention too.

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    Nah, both the cheaters and leakers should get banned. But of course you'll say this, you got caught cheating and hence the comment.

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      I think you might be tripping bro, you better go see a doctor. I said nowhere that cheaters shouldn't be punished.

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2 years ago, # |
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Be like me sit for 2hrs solve A and go!

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2 years ago, # |
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I have one suggestion that we can decrease the rank of people who get caught due to plagiarism like -450 or -500 something like that and in the graph we can show that they cheated in a contest and it gets highlighted which will eventually demotivate people from cheating or have some fear of cheating

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    2 years ago, # ^ |
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    This is a good idea! If the motivation for cheating is "I want higher rating" or "I want my friend to get a higher rating", and the punishment for being caught is simply "rating unchanged, since contest doesn't count for you", there is very little incentive for such cheaters to stop cheating.

    But on the other hand, if the punishment was "rating decreases" (preferably by a formula which is superlinear to the number of past cheating cases), or for the really egregious cases, "rating resets to 0", then such people would think twice before cheating, and one who is caught cheating once and punished for it would be far less likely to dare to try this again.

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      2 years ago, # ^ |
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      Yup, I agree with you. IMO most people cheat so that they can showcase their rank in resume and get a job in good company and implying such things will make them think twice before cheating as someone sees their profile and can easily figure out they have cheated in past

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2 years ago, # |
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Make it so that when you look at a cheater profile it has big red text saying "Cheater"

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2 years ago, # |
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Your age 125678 years and you are sayan. When you unclock super sayan and super sayan 2 and super sayan 3 and super sayan 4 and super sayan god and super sayan blue and super sayan rose and other? And don't try to deny it

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2 years ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +39 Vote: I do not like it

I remember about 2 years ago when I was struggling for Expert I also used to get depressed by observing these activities because trust me the most affected zone is <= experts because of cheaters. Don't take me wrong but that's actually good in some ways.

  1. Usually, the problem with rating <= 1900 is destroyed because of cheaters and you may not see any good positive delta until you start solving problem > 1900 between the contest. And once you start that you will see you are about 300 ratings above than your current one and now no there are no cheaters.

  2. Also, the people who were involved in cheating they cant grow more just because they developed the habit of not thinking on their own, they will always try to find the easy way to get solutions from someone else so decrease in good participants as well for your future because they will never gonna surpass you.

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2 years ago, # |
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Not only D was leaked last contest and in python, But also C in cpp ! Leaderboards are so messed for the last contest, cheaters doing both C and D was absolute shit See Similar Submissions for C below with obfuscation, They fool the system by obfuscation!!

174427324 174419555 174427324 174421050 174415745 174418707 Those are just few.

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2 years ago, # |
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I have a way out — to delete accounts with a rating of less than 1800. (❁´◡`❁)