Online competitions are dead.
It was fun while it lasted. Some of us were lucky enough to witness the golden age of competitive programming. But AI changed it.
Your online results are meaningless. Your online rating is pointless. Not because you cheat, but because others do — and you cannot know how much of the scoreboard you can trust.
There is no stopping it. We keep chasing obvious cases, but cheating will become less and less obvious over time.
“But people could cheat before. They could share ideas or code.”
Yes. But that kind of cheating required at least two people willing to cooperate. Now it takes only one.
“What about screen recordings?”
A recording of your screen cannot show what you are doing on your phone. You do not even need to copy an entire solution.
I do not see a reliable way to restore trust in unsupervised online competition.
Of course, in-person contests are a different story. IOI and ICPC circuits are fine. Training from home is still useful, and solving problems is still fun. But competing from home and expecting the results to be a trustworthy measure of individual ability? Not anymore.
“Isn’t competitive programming too big to die? Aren’t too many people involved?”
There is a way forward: more in-person competitions.
Organize contests at your school or university. Build local communities. Find people you can compete with in the same room.
Compete against each other, no online cheaters.
atp just do it for urself. we have machines to do heavy lifting, but we still go gym for our physical health right. ty and have a nice day
But we don't see people using robots to run marathons in their place, do we? We still practice while AI is getting stronger and stronger, but the competition is a whole different story. Practising and competing both contribute to our skills, but the former doesn't have any immediately visible feedback, whereas the latter does.
Fair that competition gives a relative stand. But why do u need that. If you can solve qs faster than before that's a good reason to be happy. And the post says pick freinds that uk are genwin. Use them as a standard. Use people who uk are goated as a standard. Dc about mere rank.
"ICPC circuits are fine" wait till you find out what happened at Indian ICPC prelims (Amritapuri/Kanpur/Chennai/Mathura)
I believe he meant offline competitions only. The preliminary round for India ICPC was held online due to the scale of the competition in India. The only offline part in this were the trustworthy (?) invigilators in each institute. Regardless, the organizing committee have accounted for all that and all strong teams will qualify for the regionals.
Ratings are just a number; what matters is what got you there
The experience, the problem solving skills, the discipline, and the cognitive growth you gained through training are real, regardless of whether the leaderboard is trustworthy
AI-assisted cheating might inflate someone’s rating or win them prizes but it cannot give them the underlying ability that the rating is supposed to represent
If people think cheating is a shortcut to genuine achievement, they are only fooling themselves
The real loss is not an unreliable rating but losing sight of why we compete and learn in the first place
Can't agree more. Look at my heatmap, tho I haven't done more harder problems but I've done almost 70-70 problems of all ratings from 800 till 1300, still it took me a while to become a stable Pupil but, now I am back to a newbie. And, I know someone with almost same heatmap and number of problems as me, being an expert. So, I can't help but accept the fact, that either I'm dumb or I'm hopeless in this phase of cheating.
it's crazy how many really nice things we take for granted. being able to roll out of bed and have a fair competition with thousands of other math enthusiasts. "solving problems" isn't nearly as enjoyable as actual fair competition. I think that competitive programming, even the real-life competitions, might die soon too, since really the biggest advantage competitive programming had over math competitions is that you could easily extend it to online contests. and especially since $$$AI$$$ is doing so much real-world coding, there might not nearly be as much interest in $$$IOI$$$ and $$$ICPC$$$.
When guns were invented, people assumed swords and physical strength were completely obsolete. However, there has always been a place for them to stand strong and show their true worth. The same applies to Competitive Programming (CP) in the era of AI. I may still be a beginner, but I refuse to believe that CP can't give you a massive edge