I agree with your point that this year's qual was too normal compared to the previous year's. However, I strongly disagree with your take on using AI.

From the announcement, it didn't feel like not using AI would put us in such a major disadvantage.

The announcement clearly says: "You can participate in a team of 3 or less, the use of AI is allowed and encouraged." If the use of tools that can enhance the speed of writing code is explicitly allowed and encouraged, it should be quite clear that by not using them, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage.

So, no one in my team had any prior experience with coding agents or with any LLM usage, so we didn't attempt to use anything during the contest.

So again, there are well-known tools that everyone can use. Your argument is that since your team had no prior experience using it, you were put at a disadvantage. To me, it sounds similar to: "I only know Pascal. Clearly, people who use C++ have an advantage, since they can use standard library data structures such as vector and map. The problems were pretty much out of reach for Pascal coders, implementation-wise." Yes, sure, they were, but that's not the contest's problem, but a matter of using the right tools for the right problems.

I think we have to accept that LLMs are here to stay and embrace them. Using LLMs in these types of contests definitely feels quite different from what we are all used to and might remove some of the "fun" for some participants. However, it also enables you to try many more ideas than you could before, given the contest's short length.

if you don't use AI, you are at a disadvantage

At this point, LLMs are just another tool at your disposal, right? Yes, you have to pay to use one, and you're subject to quotas and whatnot. However, even free offerings or basic subscriptions (such as ChatGPT Plus) already give you enough capacity to write "simple boilerplate code".

Your post is basically saying: "Writing boilerplate is not fun, testing out ideas is. There are tools to reduce the unfun part, but I didn't use them. This sucks." It's your choice which tools to use.

Our solution to A is ~450 LOC. If you remove all comments and account for the fact that AI is writing verbose code, it'll be ~300LOC of human-written code. For comparison, our solution to the previous year's Qual A is ~200LOC. So yes, the amount of code is somewhat higher, but it's not like it's that high.

Jury could write boilerplate code for us

Honestly, I don't see how it's different from asking an AI to write it for you, except that AI-generated code can be tailored to your prompt and language of choice. Heck, even a free-tier LLM could do that. Why put even more effort on contest authors when generating that boilerplate code yourself is dirt cheap?

How to solve B? :(

I don't remember the whole problem and solution, but my teammates reduced the problem to the following: you have N subsets with sizes from 16 to 20, each subset is colored in either 1 or 2. You have to color all the elements of array in such a way that for each subset there were at least one element in this subset colored in its color.

It's easy to prove that assignment of random colors give us a reasonably large success probability. It's about (1 - 2^- 16)ⁿ which is as I remember about 0.2 or sth like that. Repeating this solution several times decreases the error to a very small value

I actually use gettimeofday function to measure time (since clock gives wrong values). Moreover, you shouldn't call this function frequently, since all syscalls are extremely slow in Topcoder. Also, you can try to test it on examples, writing something (like number of operations or iterations of your solution) to stderr. If your solution makes significantly less operations on server that locally that you are doing something wrong with time measuring.

And what about 75 USD in BTC for the April contest? I didn't received any email where I could specify my BTC wallet

Where can I specify my BTC wallet number to receive the money? Or the organizers will contact me by email?

Admins said that most likely this problem will be removed

Where did you find information about date of the Deadline24 Quals? I can't find it on its site...

Does anyone know how to solve J2 task?

I tried to do some kind of dsbox-debug magic, but failed. I can only get this message "Verifying license information... OK", but this doesn't help me

Frozen Heart:

• Nikitosh
• Tehnar
• ComradePetr

Probably it will be 2 / 6 * 100 = 33 points (because jury's answer consists of 6 pair of similar solutions and in your answer are only 2 pairs)

Does anyone know when can we expect to see detailed information about Finals? It's 28th March now and orgs said that it would be around 15th March...

How many teams will be qualified for final round?

Because problem E was rejudged.

If you are using char*, you can make sth like

char s[1000];
gets(s + 1);
or
scanf("%s", s + 1);

I think that your output contains '\n' in the end. But in checker comment it is ignored. May be this '\n' not needed in output

It is explaied in statement. Read carefully.

parity(a) = c % 2, c is count of '1' in a