Organizing programming competitions (Artifacts from ACES Coders v8 2020)

[Gihan Jayatilaka]

Hi all,

This was originally posted on the CE-wiki (which is obsolete by now) after completing ACES Coders v8 in 2020. I am emailing it here for archiving purposes.

Organizing programming competitions (Artifacts from ACES Coders v8 2020)

Past problems:

• See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cepdnaclk and https://github.com/cepdnaclk/codeBase

Testcase generation tool:

• See https://github.com/gihanjayatilaka/programming-competition-testcase-generation

Plagiarism detection tools:

• Download all submissions https://github.com/kasvith/hackerrank-dl
• Check for plagiarism https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

Concerns about HackerRank:

• If you are allowing pypy as a programming language, submit a pypy code and see the time consumption. If not, someone can take an unfair advantage.
• You cannot organize private contests on HR.

An Idea for improvement (which we planned buy couldn't execute in 2020):

• Keep smaller test case scores visible and some of the larger test case scores hidden. Reveal the full score at the end. Announcing of winners can be done in the google code jam format (See https://youtu.be/Vo4GmHxZzZo?t=3814 1:03:34 onwards). This will make our award ceremony interesting to watch. This can be done by marking test cases “additional” on HR. However, we might have to write code for a cool reveal presentation.  
• If we are to go this way in a future year, the system should be tested very well to avoid issues. For example, all the test cases are visible in a normal Hackerrank contest. Therefore, contestants voice their complaints and discuss them with the organizers throughout the 12hrs. Sometimes the organizers modify the test cases/question statements. However, if some hidden test cases are revealed in the end and a contestant raises a concern, there will be no way to correct it.

Regards,
Gihan

[Gihan Jayatilaka]

PS:

Moonshot idea (this has been revolving since 2016)

Converting ACES Coders into an ACM ICPC Regional contest so that the winning team will have a spot at ICPC world finals.

https://icpc.global/regionals/start-contest

 

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