Penalty Time: rule change (and the story behind it)
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Bartholomew Furrow
Jul 31, 2008, 7:08:02 PM7/31/08
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Dear Code Jammers,
Those of you who qualified for Round 2 should receive this message shortly, but I wanted to set up a natural avenue for response and discussion, so here goes.
We wanted to let you know that we have officially changed the rules for penalty time in Google Code Jam back to what we originally intended. The rule that will apply is as follows:
Penalty Time = Total submission time of the last input you correctly solve (time is measured from start of contest) + four minutes for each incorrect small submission (only for small inputs you eventually solve)
If you're interested in the reasons why we made this change, read on.
We had planned to use this rule all along, after testing the alternative in beta contests. We implemented it in our code and altered our rules, but due to a transcription error we didn't change our Terms and Conditions.
This inconsistency was pointed out to us after Round 1A, and we realized that different people had been competing under different rules. We advanced the top 840 people from both versions of the rule (848 in total): in other words, if you would have advanced under either version of the penalty time rule, you advanced to Round 2. After Round 1A we switched to the version in the Terms & Conditions, since that was the one page all contestants had seen. Aside from a slight increase in the number of Round 2 contestants, and of course some confusion, our error did not cause negative consequences for anyone.
Since Round 1 ended, we have confirmed that we are able to use the penalty rules based on the last input you correctly solve, instead of the last small input you correctly solve. We heard from many of you who liked the original rules better, and the Code Jam engineering team agreed; so we're changing our code back, changing our rules back, and (finally!) changing our Terms & Conditions. This change is not retroactive, so it does not affect the scoring for any rounds that have already taken place.
Sorry for the two quick changes to the penalty rules; we hope you'll agree that this final decision will make the contest better for everyone.
Bartholomew
Those of you who qualified for Round 2 should receive this message shortly, but I wanted to set up a natural avenue for response and discussion, so here goes.
We wanted to let you know that we have officially changed the rules for penalty time in Google Code Jam back to what we originally intended. The rule that will apply is as follows:
Penalty Time = Total submission time of the last input you correctly solve (time is measured from start of contest) + four minutes for each incorrect small submission (only for small inputs you eventually solve)
If you're interested in the reasons why we made this change, read on.
We had planned to use this rule all along, after testing the alternative in beta contests. We implemented it in our code and altered our rules, but due to a transcription error we didn't change our Terms and Conditions.
This inconsistency was pointed out to us after Round 1A, and we realized that different people had been competing under different rules. We advanced the top 840 people from both versions of the rule (848 in total): in other words, if you would have advanced under either version of the penalty time rule, you advanced to Round 2. After Round 1A we switched to the version in the Terms & Conditions, since that was the one page all contestants had seen. Aside from a slight increase in the number of Round 2 contestants, and of course some confusion, our error did not cause negative consequences for anyone.
Since Round 1 ended, we have confirmed that we are able to use the penalty rules based on the last input you correctly solve, instead of the last small input you correctly solve. We heard from many of you who liked the original rules better, and the Code Jam engineering team agreed; so we're changing our code back, changing our rules back, and (finally!) changing our Terms & Conditions. This change is not retroactive, so it does not affect the scoring for any rounds that have already taken place.
Sorry for the two quick changes to the penalty rules; we hope you'll agree that this final decision will make the contest better for everyone.
Bartholomew
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