1CrPlace's blog

By 1CrPlace, history, 3 years ago, In English

Increased pressure amongst students due to increasing competition out there along with companies' preferences of high ratings on platforms like codeforces and codechef has increased a lot of cheating online. I want to highlight this fact to @Admins out there. Several Telegram groups discuss live solutions, and it does not end here I want to highlight a fact of recent contest that solutions are getting leaked on youtube channels as well during the contests, One such example is: Solutions leaked during contest on youtube We can see that here solutions are leaked till problem E1. and that too during the contest timings!!

So a good competitive coder will perform similar to the one who merely searched for solutions online -> it will make them disheartened and they will also indulge in such kind of practices -> now admins will see that more and more submissions are there for those questions which are supposed to be tough -> they will increase the difficulty without knowing the actual state of the genuine coders out there and the cycle goes on and on.

It will spoil the major motive of organizing contests.

Something must be done in order to stop this

Thank You

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +24 Vote: I do not like it

Competitive Programming is based on ethics, cheaters will find a way of cheating in every contest. What are your suggestions for improving this?

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +26 Vote: I do not like it

One thing can be done is there can be a report submission option like on other platforms to report plagiarized solution after the contest and admins can decide to limit warning them upto 2 or 3 and later make them unrated or ban them.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -7 Vote: I do not like it

And then what? Yeah, you was found the "cheater", but what should happen? Youtube will block this channel? Mike Mirzayanov will start searching for the cheater all over the codeforce? Everyone knows, that there are many cheaters on this site. Cheaters will always and everywhere, unfortunately. There's nothing we can do about it.

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3 years ago, # |
Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

You're correct. Cheaters are horrible, and they hurt us. They don't know this, but they do.

Most cheaters would just copy paste some code they found online, and they would be found fast.

However, I would request the admins to be gentle with the ban hammer. In case someone does get flagged as suspicious, kindly make sure they're guilty before banning them. Current method of "skipping" their submissions for the current contest, seems to be okay enough.

However, I worry about wrong detection.

In most cases, even beginners like myself can solve A & B. Since their solutions tend to be small, it's possible for even two different legitimate coders to code the same solution, and be flagged as plagiarizing from each other.

Then there's a possibility of someone copying our competitive programming header code, from our previous submissions, and that causing a legitimate original coder to be flagged as plagiarizing. I don't know if this happens. However, it's a possibility.

Cases of cheating would be observable if a beginner starts submitting >1500 difficulty questions. Either they're extremely smart, or they're cheating. However, it might be difficult to find cheaters if they're somewhat experienced, and not a total beginner.

Anyway, as a final words : I would take a more offensive approach.

  1. After the contest starts, the admins could "leak" wrong solutions on youtube, ideone, etc. which pass the pretests, but they fail on a specific corner case. Along with cheaters simply copy-pasting the source code, the failures would indicate which ones are probably cheating. I say probably, because some other legitimate coders could also make this mistake.

  2. Infiltrate such Telegram groups, Whatsapp groups, and admins could "leak" solutions to them directly, so that they submit the file, and get caught. It might be better to hand out these poisoned solutions to trusted community members here, such that the process can be scaled up to an extremely large network. The admins don't have to then manually track these cheaters down. The cheaters would directly submit the solutions.

  3. Finally but most importantly : Do NOT ban cheaters on the spot. Let them spend a few months building their ratings higher, then at once, ban thousands of these cheaters at once. Letting them cheat over few months, would help you to collect enough evidence against them, and finally, when you ban them after they increase their ratings but thousands, you completely waste their time, money and resources. This would ensure that they face a severe loss for their actions. To ensure that other people's deltas and ratings aren't affected badly because of the cheaters, recalculate the standings after a huge ban wave of cheaters, and award the legitimate coders with better rankings for their honest work. It's a little bit delayed, but they deserved it.

EDIT 1 : As an additional, but very important note: If the admins do take such an offensive route of action, this would scare the cheaters from submitting code they found online. It could be poisoned, and they could get banned. Cheaters, thus, will live in perpetual fear.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it

Leaving aside the cheating part, one thing that concerns me is that this increased cheating will lead to a decrease in the actual rating of the problem. Suppose, a problem should initially be rated around 1600. Now if 1000 greys solve this problem by unfair means, the problem rating is bound to be around 1200 according to the cf algorithm.
This in future will create a hindrance for practising and demotivate beginners that they couldn't solve that problem.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Can this be actually used as an additional criterion for identifying cheaters? Looking at your example, the system could see that these 1000 greys are obvious outliers.

    I mean, let's suppose that the system estimated the problem difficulty as 1200 because of a gang of grey cheaters. But in this case cyans were supposed to solve it relatively easily too. And if in reality they didn't, then we have a statistical anomaly.

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      3 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +5 Vote: I do not like it

      You can never guarantee that. Sometimes, a newbie can solve even D or E, if the idea just clicks. That doesn't mean he/she cheated. So, it would be really unfair for the honest participants.

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it

https://youtu.be/xpuLhmR5rZc ..this guy uploaded for today's contest as well and that too in 1 hour from the contest start he uploaded till D.