TLDR: AIs give us a lesson. Rating and scoreboards are meaningless. And they tell us, it's time to find the real spirit of "competitive programming".
If you want to understand the sentence above, please enter. Let's make a short description of the state now. Taking the example from the edu round last night.
A brave candidate master xiaoxiaobaozi, which is definitely not an AI, successfully beat all the AIs. However, despite this, the top pages of the scoreboard are almost captured by AIs.
Randomly choose a submission by top greys/greens/cyans. OH. ENGINEERIC VARIABLE NAMES. Ok. They are AI. But, look at him. Nikhilesh_Kancherla. He conquered the contest in 6 minutes. Looks weird. Let's check his code. Hmmmm. Regular code style. Sussy tab distance. With them, you can't identify whether he's an AI or not. It's easy for a VSCode user to change his tab distance by just a click away. Surely a lot of user believe he is an AI, but I don't think so. In fact, if you just add a piece of prompt to tell the AI which code style to use, it'll become impossible to identify AI by reading the code.
As what here mentioned, a lot of common anti-AI methods appear to be useless by counter-countermeasures.
The ruined scoreboard can never be restored, and the number of AIs can only increase, regardless what the countermeasures you make.
So what can we do?
Think about it. The first half of the scoreboard is filled with AIs. Tourist-level AIs make it impossible to reach Master of above for a human. What should we do? Exit this platform and never do competitive programming again?
NO. Don't forget why you started competitive programming. IT'S THE PROBLEMS THEMSELVES.
Don't forget the happiness you get when you finally solve a difficult problem. Don't forget the shock when you solved a problem by a complex mechanism but see a much simpler method in solution. That's all. rainboy and tibinyte2006 already showed us how to do this.
Guys. It's time to find the core spirit of the competitive programming instead of being interested in talking about rating. It's the best time to throw the ratings and ranks away, to find the happiness behind the problems themselves.
How are you so certain he is not an AI? I doubt there is a possibility for a CM to solve G in 20 minutes, which took a lot of LGMs more than half an hour. Also you can see from his submissions that he as headings for all A-F but not G.
it's very likely they are cheater(if not 100%), yet there are many ways to cheat without AI. (e.g. multi-user cheating)
You're completely right. Why worry so much about rating? We should abolish rating and the standings table, so that no one ever knows the results of a contest, then people will stop worrying so much about it.
In fact, why even host contests? All they do is cause stress to the users and set them in pursuit of arbitrary numerical ranking goals. But after we get rid of those, we won't need them any more! Codeforces should just go full online-judge and have a giant list of problems. If you want to simulate the experience of being in a round, stick a couple of them together. This fixes the long queue issue too since there's no spike of people submitting at the same time. Genius!
Yep, Now cp is just for fun only. I think we became like human calculator, cool but no use. haha One advantage is we can generalize the learned knowledge better in other areas? but eventually AI will be better at those too.
I can see the end of cp. Sure. sad
Agreed
You make it meaningless to cheat, so no one would cheat. genius.
at this point we should all just reverse solve and focus on improvement rather than rating. after all there is like an invisible barrier due to the amount of cheaters
tibinyte2006 orz
This. Why are people so obsessed over internet points? If Competitive Programming genuinely interests you, then ratings shouldn't matter at all.
Most people who cheat do this for vanity, or to improve their job resume. Eventually, software companies and everyone else will realize that Codeforces ratings aren't a credible indicator of one's logical, reasoning, or coding abilities. Codeforces ratings will lose its relevance in the IT world. When this happens, ratings, rank, and other superficial parameters will be rendered useless, and most people would stop cheating once and for all.
I give it like 2 years before this happens. So all we have to do is hold on for a couple years, and this platform will once again regain its lost glory. No phone verification, no IP tracking, no cheating reporting. All we need is time!
The thrill of competitive programming comes from competing with each other(humans). Now you need to find that same rush but you are competing against ai.