So, I got this email recently:
Attention!
Your solution 91837075 for the problem 1409E significantly coincides with solutions Svlad_Cjelli/91837075, SeismicToss/91842722. Such a coincidence is a clear rules violation. ...
The first weird thing is that it's accusing me of plagiarizing my own solution. OK, that's probably just a glitch.
But what about the other accusation? Here are the two solutions: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1409/submission/91837075 https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1409/submission/91842722
They do have similar-looking logic. But this is a very simple problem — there aren't that many things to try. It's very natural to have a loop to find the best answer for a single interval, and then another loop to find the answer for two intervals.
I also have never used IDEOne or anything like that during a contest. I do everything locally.
So the possibilities are:
- It's just a coincidence.
- SeismicToss somehow hacked into my computer or the CF servers, using his master hacking skills to cheat on a Div3 contest.
- I am a master hacker, and used my abilities to cheat on a Div3 contest by stealing a solution from the future (I'm also a time traveler in this scenario).
Keep in mind this contest wasn't rated for either of us so it would be even sillier for any of us to cheat.
Is there some way to manually review the plagiarism accusation? It doesn't seem to have any effect so far, but I don't want to get banned for a different false positive later. I am also a bit worried because there's another blog post (https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/60663) calling for a stricter plagiarism checker. I think that could be a disaster...
