tarche's blog

By tarche, history, 21 month(s) ago, In English

I was sifting through the hacking tab of today's contest, (post-contest anxiety, am fine I swear), when I noticed that Snow_Coder, a 13-hour old account, has already successfully hacked 27 solutions in today's contest:

Looking a bit deeper, they are all hacks to problem A, which have very clearly been rigged for this:

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
	
using namespace std;
	
void solve()
{
	int n, m;cin >> n >> m;
	string s, t;cin >> s >> t;
	reverse(t.begin(), t.end());
	s += t;
	int cnt = 0;
	for (int i = 0;i < n + m - 1;i++)
	{
		if (s[i] == s[i + 1]) cnt++;
	}
	if (cnt > 1)cout << "NO\n";
	else cout << "YES\n";
}
	
signed main() 
{
	long t;cin >> t;
	if (t == 5) cout << "ha";
	while (t-- > 0) solve();
}

(this, for example, is 193850578 by tuxaji). When comparing it to SnowCoder's own solution (193842779), we can clearly see they are preeety similar: there are no format changes, except for the if (t == 5) line, and some minor formatting (using long long when it is not needed, not spacing some operations, changing a > 1 for a >= 2)

Now, my question is, what even is the point? After all, Educational Rounds do not give any penalty benefits for a successful hack, and this is clearly a case of botting and/or plagiarism

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