Recently, I participated in Educational Codeforces Round 173 (Rated for Div. 2), and I received a system message reporting that my submission 298211934 for the problem 2043B - Digits significantly coincides with Alexandr_White. As a result, all other submissions from that contest were skipped, I was disqualified, and my rating was rolled back.

After reviewing both submissions, I noticed that they are indeed almost identical. I believe this issue arises because the problem has only one straightforward solution, which doesn’t offer much room for variation in implementations.

For example, consider the following problems:

2057A - MEX Table — just print max(n, m) + 1

2044A - Easy Problem — just print n - 1

2009A - Minimize! — just print b - a

1445C - Division — just print x - 1 and y

While these problems are enjoyable to solve and sometimes tricky, being disqualified because your code coincidentally matches another contestant’s solution is quite frustrating. I think the plagiarism detector should be less strict for simpler problems where the solutions are limited in diversity.

If you have any suggestions to address this issue, feel free to share them in the comments.