I suspect this reasoning, or something like it, is the same faulty rationale that Baidu used to justify their cheating at the competition. As others have alread

I suspect this reasoning, or something like it, is the same faulty rationale that Baidu used to justify their cheating at the competition. As others have already said better than I could, if the goal is indeed to >"promote the most accurate and powerful image recognition algorithms that will transform the world as we know it" as you say, then running hundreds of attempts at this one data set to do better at this specific competition won't foster that goal.