While I agree that a lot of the confusion could've been avoided by reading more carefully, part of the problem was the dissemination of information. Facebook di

While I agree that a lot of the confusion could've been avoided by reading more carefully, part of the problem was the dissemination of information. Facebook did a really poor job of this unfortunately, as all of the information was in multiple locations, and was not at all redundant. For example, the initial rules were in the FAQs, some updates were posted in the main group (Hacker Cup), and then other updates were posted in the Hacker Cup Qualification event page. So if you wanted a complete picture, you needed to check all three. And if the answer wasn't there, you weren't going to get one, as they weren't responding to questions at all as far as I could tell (and for fairly good reason - if you didn't filter out the non-official posts, the page was nigh unreadable). The bigger problem in my book, however, was the issues with the submission system. I tried both Firefox and Chrome, and couldn't get the "download input" link to function properly (I tried, left clicking, "save as"-ing, opening in a new tab, etc.). Add the 6-minute time limit to this, and it was pretty bad. Six minutes to get the download to work, run your code on it, and then get back to the page, paste your output, and upload. Oh, and good luck eyeballing your output to make sure you pasted it correctly -- the window you paste into wasn't resize-able, and every line wrapped, so it looked like an utter mess. Don't get me wrong, I sound rather negative in this post, but I love the idea, and look forward to the next attempt at it. I was just somewhat disappointed to see how the process went. And to be honest, I really wish they'd do away with the 6 minute time limit, and add a time limit for how long your code is allowed to take during execution. Though I suppose they have to restrict the languages then. Perhaps a "can you finish the problem within the 3 hour time limit" is sufficient for this competition then. As it is, knowing when to optimize, and when not to takes too long to figure out in the 3 hour time limit, so you end up taking a shot in the dark as to when you should be submitting your code. Hopefully Facebook learns from these mistakes, and comes back with a competition that is just that much better. Also, if you're interested in the problem solving for this competition, check out the Puzzle Master. It's great fun as well.