nor's blog

Preserving Hash Code?
By nor, history, 14 months ago, In English

As was noted in this blog, Google decided to discontinue its programming contests (Code Jam, Kick Start and Hash Code).

It seems they will take down all relevant servers (and hence the problems and the submission system) for all these contests. While there are some initiatives to archive past Code Jam and Kick Start problems (for example, here — also have a look at this comment), there seems to be nothing similar for Hash Code.

As a past participant of Hash Code, I believe that these types of contests are quite important too, and may have directly or indirectly inspired other such contests (like the Reply Challenge and AtCoder Heuristic Contests). Also there are some techniques like simulated annealing and using SAT/ILP solvers that might not show up in standard competitive programming websites but do show up in such optimization contests. The tutorials for them will be lacking without examples too.

So here are my questions to anyone who might have reliable information about the contests, since everything seems to be in a mess right now:

  1. Are there copyright issues that prevent the problems from being archived and open for submissions elsewhere (for a non-profit scenario)? This also holds for the BOJ hosting, so it might be possible that they have discussed the relevant issues already (though I am not aware of any such details).
  2. Does anyone have any ideas on how to archive these problems? For instance, what kinds of data need to be preserved (statements? scorers? output submissions? code submissions? ranklists?).
  3. If all goes well, is it possible to set this up with other existing Code Jam and Kick Start archives?
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Comments Comments (8)
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14 months ago, # |
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Hi I am not sure if I am the right person to answer all your queries, but I will still try to answer them to the best of my knowledge, hopefully someone can correct me if I am wrong somewhere.

  1. I asked this legal question internally (almost to every googler I personally knew who was contributing to Coding Competitions). Since this is not an everyday scenario, I do not have an absolute confirmation, although their responses kinda seemed on the positive side. I might need to ask a senior staff. Hopefully I will get some clarity soon, or someone experienced can help us.

  2. (& also 3) I had discussed with two of my friends about how we save Kick-Start and Codejam problems, and the only thing that came to our minds was creating a CF group and saving them one by one. It will need several active members contributing for that though, especially since time is short.
    We were inspired by something similar that has been done with IOI archives as well.

    Problem statements, tests(up to 2019-20) are already there. Solutions for most problems can also be obtained from ranklists itself. For testcases which aren't there, we considered 2 things:
    a. we request some respectable CPers to help us out
    b. we make a github repo where community could add issues for weak tests
    CF has also had Hashcode type contests in the past, so maybe we could include them here in a similar manner as well. Afaik Hashcode data-sets are already available, so added plus.
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    14 months ago, # ^ |
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    I think writing scorers for Hash Code is quite a non-trivial task (and sometimes it might need a ton of computational resources, or the scorers for each subtask might be different). Do you know of a way to access all contest materials from the Hash Code side of things rather than writing things from scratch?

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14 months ago, # |
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(un)rolling hash code 😔

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14 months ago, # |
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and may have directly or indirectly inspired other such contests

AHC is directly inspired by topcoder's marathons.

While I agree with the sentiment that everything should be preserved. Especially the results. It's worth noting that HashCode problems are of a really bad quality and their educational value is next to none. Marathons/AHCs are way more useful. Sadly, marathons are already not preserved considering old marathons are inaccessible (including problem statements, results, solutions and forum posts).

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    14 months ago, # ^ |
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    Apologies for the misattribution, I had totally forgotten about marathons. Unfortunately I have never competed in one (and can say the same about a lot of other Hash Code participants), so Hash Code was the starting point for me and some tutorials that I remember seeing on related topics.

    Thanks for the reference by the way — from your comment it seems that it is a good idea to also dig up old marathons by coordinating with the topcoder staff/authors.

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14 months ago, # |
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Google owns Kaggle and was supposed to store old Hashcode contests there, I recall. That would be nice.

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14 months ago, # |
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Thanks for having the same idea as my blog idea and representing it in a better way. Ofcourse people prefer some master posting this rather than a newbie! :cry: (referring to : https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113194) But since this blog will do the same work, I am happy.

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    14 months ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it

    I didn't know about your blog, it seems we wrote about it at the same time. Given that the difference in publishing time was just 8 minutes, and that I had to collect all relevant links and list out all possible issues, it should be clear imo.

    Anyway, I am glad to see that there are others who feel the same way.

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