Radewoosh has a theory ( which he mentioned somewhere I dont remember ) that the people who use the word "Question" instead of "problem/task" are Indians ( and that is true ), and well, I hope you know the record of cheating with Indians.

Update : I found the link : https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/71825?#comment-561525

Because it is wrong

Cause question is just a wrong word for describing algorithmic problems. Question is meant to be shorter and in some sense more lightweight like "could you pass me the salt?" or "why is the sky blue?". When you are given whole story and presented a convoluted statement "problem" or "task" seem much more appropriate and serious and everybody except Indians recognizes that difference. It's not like it is fundamentally wrong, but it somehow feels worse

Because saying it's a problem/task (something given to you) will make you think if it's from a running contest or not. While question seems more like something you came up by yourself.

Expose the blue mf :(

Do you know how many of these type of posts have been made?

So you are encouraging people to cheat?

Look, how ironic. This guy himself had posted an entire Codechef Long Challenge Problem on StackOverflow while the contest was running. F**king hypocrite. People like you smear the reputation of the Indian programming community.

Looks like we already know one of the nicknames

very bold of you to assume cheaters will not cheat again after seeing these exposing blogs

I think mass internet surveillance would bring much more issues than it would solve... It's very hard to have a global censorship policy that has no chance of going very wrong, for example...

Anyway, I agree on the reporting mechanism being a great idea, it's a good deterrent to this kind of behavior, I'm surprised it's not already implemented.

Though, obviously, it would just reduce the cheating, not get rid of it. I don't think we can really get rid of it, specially since it's not really the focus of CF and CC, the focus is more on having a good platform and good contests, not on having an accurate ranking.

I think the harder issue is that there are many external incentives to get a higher ranking that shouldn't be there, because it's not what the rating is for. Rating is just a number you try to make go up, not an accurate measure of how smart you are, and the cheaters are just exploiting those who think the opposite.

It's not this problem. Getting messages about how to solve some problem is not such a problem, but I am simply sad getting mentioned messages and realizing that many participants try their best fairly while other people do such things and end higher in standings.

There are lots of cheatings happening in Codeforces too. There are several telegram groups operating where codeforces solutions get leaked during the contests.

Do companies ask about CF/Leetcode/atcoder/etc... handles?(Sorry for lame question) If yes, then probably most cheaters are cheating for that purpose.

This is an interesting point. Unfortunately, I think people will still cheat regardless (see: the number of people who play chess online using an engine). But it might help.

Maybe I am not good enough to be in this discussion. But, cheating can go on even without hiring concept.

Let me mention my case. I am extremely guilty of it now. It was in a CF contest. I submitted A and I had internet connection problem. I got my connection restored after 1:30 hour. So, I had no other choice. Submitted C with cheating, solved B and D, still got minus but managed to save a disaster.

What wrong made me to do cheating? Fear of getting down and doing 5/6 contests to retrieve back my position. Maybe I was too inexperienced or maybe I am a bad person. I don't know. But, I definitely regret it.

Right now, I would have no problem if Codeforces makes me to start from zero. I would happy to do that as I did cheating.

Forgive me guys if you can.

The fact that CP rating happens to be such a good metric for some companies to use pisses me off. It forces cheaters and people who don't give a fuck about CP into our community.

I highly value integrity in CP and other similar high skill cap fields, so I would like for companies to not put such a large emphasis on rating (thus indirectly hindering said integrity). Of course this won't prevent cheating entirely, but it should help.

Perhaps they can go by some alternate metric that correlates highly with true rating, such as a long-term (4-5 yr+), consistent submission log. Take, for ex, the "plot scatter" or "plot hist" commands on AC server. This also makes it so that people can't simply pick up CP just to find a job/get a referral.

tldr: Is there some metric companies can look to other than CP contest rating? Any ideas?

PS — Discussing this topic just makes me mad because frankly I don't have any influence in the way companies run their recruitment processes (to people that do: please take action!), and the current system inevitably produces cheating. And in general it's really difficult to prevent cheating (especially in CC longs) so we ought to try to reduce its benefits like OP said.

Wow, so you are exposing yourself that you are a cheater?

You seem to forget the fact that Google conducts Kickstart which features competitive programming style problems prepared by competitive programmers for hiring purposes only!

System is really bad here. Of all the Indians doing cp, a rough figure, of around 60% are forced to do cp even if they don't like. There is no scope for development here. So, no one is really into making apps and websites or any cool machine learning models. All just do cp, cram the GeeksforGeeks articles and placement interview materials at the end of 3rd year and get into companies.

As far as Indian software engineering practices are concerned, you have to realize that the supply is disproportionate to the demand. Thus, most companies seek to reduce false positives(at the cost of increasing false negatives) in their recruitment procedure. They do it simply because they can afford to do it. Its not just CP, they will use whatever measures they can to eliminate candidates(prestige of university, GPA, Projects/Resume/Coding tests etc)

You have millions of people graduating with CS degrees every year. Moreover, a lot of non-CS grads also look for IT/SE jobs. This creates a huge pool of candidates that a company has to filter through, and somewhere down the line they decided that programming tests(held on hackerrank/earth during campus hiring seasons) were a good way to achieve their goal.

Ashishgup I think you along with some other good Indian coders should write a good and detailed blog that calls out this type of activity, not generally cheating but messaging asking about some "magical concept" or algorithm.

I am not saying that this hasn't been done before or this will stop blah blah, but this might actually trigger the actual good ones to not go on this path. People upon seeing bad start thinking that why I'm not trying it if my friend/senior has been doing this and working in some big MNC. That is why I'm saying it to you because this thing is actually growing quite fast. When I joined 6 months back there was very little bad stuff going on in long or codechef(or any site that Indian's come across) in particular, but now it is multiplying like that one other virus.

Talk with hitman623, aryanc403 to create a blog and post it across all competitive websites. Might provide a change in mentality for those who are thinking of these bad practices. Also might clear the placement myth strongly and provide a motivation boost for those that actually enjoy problem-solving in free time.

Sorry for this long (rant?), but I'm convinced getting this topic called out on a large scale by you and other such people, could enforce a change in mindset. Since, we look up to you all! P.S. Please, convince GFG to delete itself, that site is a cancer. Haha, peace!

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And Red means GM.

That doesn't mean, you should cheat to increase your rating. Instead, try to learn new things, and solve problems upto the extent you can (during the contest). Learn the topics, on which your unsolved questions were based on, and then upsolve the unsolved ones. So, this isn't a valid reason to cheat. In fact, there is no valid reason you can give, to cheat.

“Because good rating helps us to get good job and secure future ,especially if you are from a third tier college , only opportunity to get chance for interview is having good competitive profile .”

So somebody who’s trying to do this in a fair way will have a worse future. Great idea of life.

But probably this isn't the most important thing here. Don't you think that the interviewers/coworkers will recognize that you aren't skilled enough to have mentioned rating?

I totally agree to your point. During this month's July Challenge, on day 1 I solved 5 problems in Div2. and was around Global rank 7. But when I checked the website yesterday, I saw my rank around 2k. During this time I got numerous people asking me how to do the fifth one and assuming many people being asked how to solve and give me the code kind of questions explains how magically everyone is being able to solve the problem they had no clue of a few minutes ago! The story is the same every month.

Will that really change anything?

As far as I understand, it's not cheating from their point of view, they are just asking "what concepts they should apply" and "if there is an online reference"

And a gif of some generic angry mom finger-wagging, to increase the psychological pressure

Chill, the problem doesn't disappear after the contest. So, you can learn fft or some other unknown algorithm after the contest and then solve the problem.

I think the issue is that during Codechef Long challenges you are already free to look up as much information as you want. And you can do it for a really long time. If even with 5 days of thorough research on the internet you are not capable of finding a solution maybe that means you really cannot solve the problem and the problem truly is beyond your skill level. Furthermore, for some problems, even a slight hint is more than enough to solve the problem. For example if a problem statement is of the form there are n queries of the form update(x) and sum(l,r) telling someone to checkout segment trees is basically telling them the solution. I think what needs to be clarified is that Codechef long challenge is not meant to be a learning opportunity but is a contest just like any other and aims to "even out" the playing field between slower participants and the faster ones.

That's stupid — knowing a particular technique can be used to solve the problem is a huge hint towards solving the problem. Even a "it's really simple" communication is enough to motivate someone to submit, say, a brute-force or unproven greedy solution, when it was not evident to them that such a solution could work.

And that's beside the point. It's a rule of contests that there should be no discussion regarding the contest at all. Don't like the rule — don't participate but don't make up justifications for flouting the rule.

Also, regarding blogs, obviously there is no ban on discussion of general competitive programming topics. If someone were to ask for a good resource to study a particular topic — I think no one would really deny — but I think the red rated users might receive a lot of such messages and that's why may not be able to/want to reply.

Will likely create more problems than it solves.

One for the reason you mentioned, simply giving any solution can be considered as collaboration.

Two for you'll likely get more annoying messages on "hey it doesn't work" "can u find bug in my code" and similar follow ups.

Sadly yes, I know people who have been placed at good companies using such condemnable strategies. Even worse is that this is demotivating for people who are doing things fairly, as a fairly catching up with a cheater is really hard.

(Edit: I just noticed you wrote you want to hear from people who support such attempts, I must clarify, I am strongly against all such cheating)

If cheaters are so curious about the solution, they can wait for the editorials which will be out after the long contest ends. Cheaters are impatient people who want to get things easily without any hardwork.

Maybe the robbers just want to see how much money you have in your wallet out of curiosity

Best strategy is not participating at all because it is not worth the time.

In long challange the sooner or later you get a problem you cannot solve, and will spend days and days on it. For what?

What time should I give for one problem in long challenge?

There's no specific metric, just keep thinking and trying ideas as long as you're absolutely out of any ideas. There may be some cases where you might surprise yourself, with a really cool idea. I remember last year in the Sept Long, there was a problem which on the face value looked kind of intimidating, but I kept working on it, believe it or not, I got the solution in my dream, the next morning when I woke up I was hyped and immediately jolted down some equations, and guess what, it actually got AC.

So yeah, you never know what one might come up with.

For those curious minds, who want to read about this bizarre way of solving, check this wiki.

P.S. :- I strongly disagree with the guy(s) above me. The beauty of Long challenges, is the time span they give you to solve problems. If you enjoy problem solving, you should most certainly participate. Ignore the cheaters, who cares about them, at the end of the day they're only digging graves for themselves, while you, a persistent hard worker, is creating neurological pathways and strengthening your skills.

I usually just read the problems, mind solve, and check if the editorial has something better after the contest. Sometimes I try coding but only for interesting problems.

Biggest fool I have ever seen.