3 ms·

Pretty frustrating to read this. Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they es

Pretty frustrating to read this. Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they essentially have a library of similar problems and solutions to reference. In which case, a top competitor can identify a similar problem, copy the source code from his previous solution, and slightly modify it to the problem's specifics. Is this considered cheating? It's incredibly frustrating for a competitor like me - who makes it into Round 2 by the skin of his teeth (rank 768 in round 1A) - to see the top guys (whose names I recognize!) finish problems in minutes. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.

GilbertErik 13y ago
I see an interesting point in this: How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost? I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?
rfurmani 13y ago
This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.

GilbertErik 13y ago

I see an interesting point in this: How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost? I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?

rfurmani 13y ago

This is a comment that often comes up, but rest assured the top competitors really are that fast from scratch. There are some screencasts floating around of Petr competing in Toocoder SRMs, and you can also look at the timings on I site Topcoder and ACM competitions, where there really is no copy and paste. That said, one does end up memorizing some things with practice. For example, after having to code it up a few times it is easy to get a nice short implementation of network flow that you can type in in 2 minutes or so.