If you open the problemset status page, you’ll notice something strange. Many users with randomly generated names (basically random letters and numbers) have made a huge number of submissions. These submissions are mostly for recent problems, one by one, and almost all use Python 3. If you click on any of them, you’ll see that they submit about once every two minutes. The code in these submissions looks very similar, so I suspect these users are actually AIs.
Here is a screenshot of a problems.
And another screenshot of a user.
it seems like an automated way to sample what problems gpt/ai can solve?
Can they be bots, like Vjudge bots?
Is it possible for a web crawler code to make accounts on codeforces and submit?
yes
Maybe this is what’s affecting the status in the problem set (stuck at "in queue")?
Yeah, I agree. I really don't mind if they are bots; it doesn't affect our problem-solving. But they are significantly slowing down the judging process. Also, I don't think they are vjudge bots. These submissions are all written in Python 3 and are clearly AI-generated code. Even if they are something like vjudge bots, the organizers should make that clear.
Submissions are taking 10 mins to run D:
If they are bots then ain't it Cloudflare's failure?