3 ms·

Never rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account

• has2k1 8y ago
  You cannot cheat that way. It tracks time since the question became live.
• nneonneo 8y ago
  That doesn't help - time is counted from midnight, so if you solve the problem on one account and then another, the second account will have a strictly worse time. About all it can really do is mess with the score distribution. Also, the input data for each problem is randomized per user, so you really do need a proper programmatic solution (i.e. simply copying another person's answer is unlikely to work).
  • aczerepinski 8y ago
    You could hurt other people's scores though right? Like if you and one other competitor traded wins on different days, but you had a second account that you posted the same solution to, your competitor would get third place on your winning days (and thus fewer points). (Please don't do this!)
• saagarjha 8y ago
  Aside from the other responses mentioning why cheating wouldn’t work, I don’t think it’s out of the question that people can solve these that quickly. The “trick”, from my experience, has been to quickly skim the problem, extract useful information (which you can “learn” to do if you do it enough), and try to figure out how to solve the problem while you are writing boilerplate to set up the problem. Using Python or a similarly high-level language often helps.
  • keithnz 8y ago
    I vaguely remember something from last year or the year before one of them was pretty quick because I could just ask wolfram alpha to solve it:)