allthecode's blog

By allthecode, 10 years ago, In English

Who answers clarifications during Codeforces contests? Problem setters? And about how many questions in average are there per contest? I imagine that usually very few, but when there is a small mistake on the statement, tons of simultaneous questions would arrive haha. I was just curious :)

It would be nice to also include stats about questions on each contest, like how many questions there were, and show the most funny ones.

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10 years ago, # |
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Problem setters ( + testers or admins if they have time).

I'm not the best person to answer the second part of the question, with my specialization in strange formats my contests always have different distribution of questions compared to the regular ones :-) Besides, some questions are not questions but comments, emotional outbursts, question marks without the actual meaning, exact duplicates of previous questions by the same person etc.

I'm not sure about the funniest question — if you already know the trick of the problem, people trying to figure it out might look funny, but not in a good way, so I don't think sharing this with everybody is a decent idea. After all, questions are kept personal for a good reason! But I know the most heart-warming question of the April Fools contest: it was not a question but a comment from a high-rated participant about how he enjoyed figuring out the joke behind 000001. It made my day!

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    Usually I answer above 20-30 questions, there are 3-5 kinds of questions, and above 7-10 copies from different participants :) Once I received question : "Is Inna a boy?" — that is probably the winner :P

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    10 years ago, # ^ |
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    to maintain anonymity, we can show the question/comment, but not the user who posted it.
    ofcourse, this is assuming that we decide to show anything at all! ;)

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      10 years ago, # ^ |
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      Would you feel comfortable about people laughing about something you meant to keep private as long as it doesn't have your name attached to it?

      People ask for clarifications if they don't understand something. We already have a tool for people to use when they want to make a public statement about the contest, and it's called "comments to blog posts". I just don't see what good could publishing the questions possibly do (but then I also don't see anything interesting in statistics about the questions).