Sniping Cheaters Episode 2: A Philosophical Rant
Background/Context:
After posting a bunch of these CF blogs, many people in my university discord asked me to leave and quit CP (since I allegedly used LLM's during contests -- if I did why am I still green). Now that I have qualified for the ICPC ECNA (regional contest) twice in a row, I want people to understand that I have never cheated on this account since the start of my journey in college. Finally, I really don't care if a lot of people on this platform used AI on the contests, if I lose rating because I couldn't solve a problem, then I view that as a personal SKILL ISSUE.
Why should one bother doing competitive programming?
- To get cracked at coding interviews
- Understand basic programming ball knowledge
- Improve problem solving skills through pattern recognition
The hard truth
Codeforces rating is just a number, and it unfortunately doesn't objectively represent your skill level (because of how easy it is to cheat). Just because you are a master on CF, that doesn't mean that you're going to get a high paying job because of that.
I'm done ranting, now here's the cheater: Prashant_ksy
He participated in the DeepInfra Round 1 and placed #141 with 2457 performance: https://codeforces.me/contest/2271/standings/participant/248292029#p248292029
Yes, he could have improved from Expert -> GrandMaster over the course of a year. (Last time, I didn't include a lot of evidence supporting my arguments with AK_YZY, other than the fact his submissions looked too clean for a pupil/speciailist.) So here is the evidence:
- His normal code looks like this, you can check his old contests too. There are no spaces between (x=y, a+=b, etc...): 393988643
- But his submissions for C and D have plenty of breathing room like an AI wrote the code with a good code standard (a = b, a += b, etc.): 393991411
- On problems E and F, he probably told the AI to change its coding style to matching his own to be less suspicious.
If you don't buy my argument, lets keep an eye on this guy in future contests and accumulate evidence against him.
