Hello everyone! This may look like yet another unnecessary blog from a low rated user. Some may even feel it is true when they reach the end of the blog. But I'm trying to address a major issue poisoning Competitive Programming and Codeforces contests, that is cheating.
Some may advice people to not be bothered with cheating and cheaters are losers and will head nowhere in life. I totally agree to most of this argument. Who am I? I'm a purple coder from my main doing competitive programming for 2 years now. Of my 20 years of life, this is the first thing I have genuinely enjoyed doing and put efforts at.
Yes, cheating does bother me. And how hard people try to ignore it, it does bother them even if it is minimal. As long as cheating affects them, it should bother them. I'm saying this from a position where I only do CP for joy and not rating. But positive deltas give me even more joy. There is no fun in playing a game when you don't win. Again, this is from my personal viewpoint which I believe others may share as well. If rating is a metric to measure somebody's skill, it needs to be protected.
I may only be affected from a small fraction of cheaters. But this number may be large for other people who are trying to find joy in this sport. I have plenty of time. So, I will try to make cheating public if I can't stop it.
Every week. I will post a blog about cheaters with proofs and evidences from this account which you guys will send me through messages. I won't be missing any week unless I died. There are lots of cheaters who simply get away without being caught. With this account, I will put all the cheaters to public. Of course, I will validate your evidences myself before posting about them. If Mike wishes, may look at the cheaters I post about and ban them.
I would love to know your opinions if this may help reduce cheating in any way.
If you make a high quality content about high rated cheaters it might increase awareness about cheating among high rated participants. With that being said, I highly doubt that it can reduce cheating. I once wrote this blog, which completely exposed a cheater harsh__h, got hundreds upvotes and nothing happened. No reaction neither from the CF team, nor from the contest coordinators.
In the last Codeforces Round 1008 (Div. 2), the authors of contest even congratulated a cheater Manasvi with top 4, despite numerous comments and even a separate blog that exposed him being a cheater.
Despite Mike's September blog about how CF is trying to be up to date with the AI cheating to keep integrity of competition, I am very disappointed with the state of things we are in right now, when they basically don't do a single thing. Even such outright dumb cheaters like Beserker69 are not banned and have no skipped submissions after the Antiplag check.
MikeMirzayanov
MikeMirzayanov
ok
Well we have already seen the effects the scary AIs have on actual contests: almost nothing. In the last div. 2 contest, I think that people were saying F was solvable by chatGPT, but not even $$$150$$$ people correctly got it. So that puts an upper bound on the number of people who are willing to cheat on hard problems.
If you are going to post about cheaters with proof and evidence, I think you should do so with your purple account; it will be more effective.