Hi Stanislav, I don't want to go into *much* detail, but I will share an anecdote.
Last year, in the qualification round, we ended up needing to disqualify hundreds of people. Why? Because they didn't know they weren't supposed to collaborate, or didn't know they were supposed to compete with multiple accounts, or they wrote their code on an insecure machine and it was stolen by an idiot "friend," or they ran their code on Ideone and didn't turn on the privacy settings, and some jerk stole it. That's no fun for anybody, so we changed the rules this year. Of course there were some genuine, deliberate rule-breakers in there, but if you need to break the rules to get through the Qualification Round, you aren't going to knock anybody out in Round 2. This year we had the option to ignore that stuff in the qualification round. So instead of sending out hundreds of emails saying "You've been disqualified for reason X", and then having dozens or hundreds of unhappy people, we got to send out hundreds of emails saying "We think you might have accidentally broken the rules for reason X, but we could be wrong. Be careful not to do X in the next rounds!". That makes *everyone* happier. Bartholomew On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:07 AM, Stanislav Zholnin < [email protected]> wrote: > Bartholomew, > > Just out of curiosity - how prevalent are disqualifications? My > understanding that they are not needed at all in QR, but the close you get > to Finals, the more time should be reasonably spent on testing contestants > compliance with rules (probably some algorithm which determines closeness > of contestants solutions using some AI-class algorithm + some analysis of > submission times). > > If you think that it's better to not get into details on disqualifications > to not tempt people in trying to break rules wihtout getting caught - I > would understand that. Compliance by obscurity actually does work in > contrary to security by obscurity. :) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google Code Jam" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-code/-/l7IVeNQwQ5wJ. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
