Yesterday I saw the announcement of the contest Code Mutants on Codeforces, it said contest will take place today (19th February). I went through the announcement, it said:
"Top 3 contestants will be rewarded with 250 Laddus!! from CodeChef.Some of the top contestants will be selected for onsite round where prizes worth 10,000 INR are waiting for you!!"
I thought: "Cool! I definitely should try it, I feel inspired!"
So I felt inspired and went to the CodeChef. In announcement there, I saw the following:
Hoping to get to onsite, I filled in this form!
Then, the contest started. Tasks turned out to be very interesting! Even more impressive was innovative Tex formatting:
After I solved the first task, I tried to submit it and clicked Submit. However, it was testing too long. "Maybe it's TL?" — I asked myself. After it was testing for 5 more minutes, I dropped that idea.
That was kinda strange. I went to my submissions of that problem and discovered that I had no submission for it. Moreover, after I tried to send the solution 5 more times, I still had no submission for it. However, after I got too nervous, I got the following message from Codechef:
So it was receiving my submissions, just wasn't displaying them anywhere. Still happy about the great contest, I went to the contest page and saw that tasks were so hard that nobody managed to solve a single problem!
However, it turned out that some solutions still were tested, though not displayed there. I went to the scoreboard and saw that somebody managed to submit a few problems. However, there were some cheaters, who, as their penalty indicates, submitted problems even before the contest started.
It got really suspicious. I went to the announcements, expecting to see the message telling about technical issues, but here is what I saw:
Nice! That's exactly what would help me now.
However, later they acknowledged that they experience some technical issues:
Anyway, I really enjoyed the contest! I have never laughed so much during the actual online competition. Tell about the contests that you enjoyed!
Thanks for attention
P.S. I didn't want to imply anything bad about the problem setters or to express any disrespect to organisers: they still have done a lot of work. Just wanted to share the best contest of my life impressions!
Who else have read the whole blog with full interest because of the title ? :p
Me. It was quite hilarious. XD
Now I think it was good that I didn't participate in the above-mentioned contest. Skipping my dinner because of something like that would really have been annoying.
I guess it is more of CodeChef issue.Because currently even the practice questions of codechef shows the same technical error.
During contest I called the codechef officials but they didn't respond properly.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Yeah, I noticed glitches with site few hours before the contest.
As far as I understand, this codechef bug with negative time penalty happens when somebody's solution is already tested and accepted, but scoreboard wasn't reloaded. Btw, problems are no so bad as for codechef :) Also, there are very many funny contest like this one on this platform)
That negative time is what I would expect from a messed up calculation with a UNIX timestamp. Perhaps the submission times are interpreted as unix time 0 (or NULL). E.g. the current time when writing this is 1550601422, which is 430722:37:02. Minus sign from calculating
submission time - contest startwheresubmission time = 0.So it seems that all these problems occurred because you didn't resubmit your google form? :/
I actually looked at the contest dashboard now. Isn't one of the problems (LIMF) missing out there?
I think organizers removed it because it is well-known problem (even in such constraints) and it was possible to google ready solution.
Yes, problem LIMF suddenly disappered after contest ended. Also, I suppose this is something not okay with problem PIT, because nobody solved it (but many people tried). And if I understand statement correctly, it is easy and non hard-to-implement problem.
A warning: I just noticed the contest still seems to be running.
Codechef issues
Yeah, but possibility to submit something didn't appear.