I think some kind of a limit on the number of submissions (per day, per hour, or total) would be preferable to rejudging on new test data.

Some reasons:
- the scoreboard would be "real"
- accepted solutions may break during rejudging, especially if only the last one is taken into account; for example, one might use too much memory (the limits are not clear)

The "input data mining" problem wouldn't be so bad if the number of submissions is capped. In a problem like the one in July'09 contest, it's hardly a problem at all, because the data is so large.

It might actually be good to allow some research on input data statistics - otherwise the contest may hinge in *guessing* what data the judges are going to provide, in order to make a good solution adapted for that kind of data.

Without rejudging, contestants will do some input stats and that's quite fair (e.g. test distribution of input sizes).

@Prunthaban

They need not be different. COMMA

I believe that the rejudge is a brillient idea. I guess all other solutions mentioned are not good. The rejudge should only be done on tie breaker and also the other limits dont make much sense to me, the waiting time could lead to an unsatisfactory experience from the website :).

I havent checked out this month's problems yet. I hope they have good test data and should have tiem limit which stresses more on the algorithm rather than low level optimizations unlike problem D4 of last month.

@Tushar Real world software development and algorithm contest are too different things. PERIOD.

I second the point raised by Saurabh above. In real world software development, performance is a very important but not the only driving factor. Design and elegance of solutions is equally important and code reuse by means of standard or previously developed libraries is not only encouraged but also essential to keep things sane. You don't go and code-up a new hash-table implementation unless it's has been nailed down as 'the' cause of performance bottleneck in the system by extensive, targeted testing (which is rare). Most of the time, it is the design / archtitecture of the system (or algorithm) which is the culprit not some corner-case idiosyncracies.

In algorithmic contests the time limits should be such that most programs with the right complexity pass. Solutions that use standard data structures like set and map from standard template library of C++ should pass because otherwise you are asking the programmers to reinvent the wheel. Similarly using cin/cout instead of scanf/printf should not lead to TLE. You can always have at least one huge test case such that you can tolerate larger multiplicative and additive constants. Otherwise the focus gets removed from algorithms and we have to focus on optimizations that discourage use of standard libraries. Using time limits that tolerate standard library features will lead to many elegant solutions that currently get rejected.

Hi Chef,

I know that you really want to make it fair but if you are re-judging the solutions , what about those solutions which will fail the new test cases but pass the old, in that case it will not give the participants to re-submit their codes, in case it is wrong. While in the online competition one can submit as long as his solution is wrong.

Why the cap ?? Most of the programmers here are college students and will probably not be coding all days of the week. So those who will feel like coding on one or two days only are gonna suffer badly...anyway I have no objections to this.

Again the cap at one solution per five minutes... If you are already implementing the cap per day then why the need for another cap ?? I mean a person will have to fruitlessly wait for the 300 seconds to pass before he actually submit again. Now if there is a compilation error or some stupid mistake in the code and one wants to resubmit again.. I am sure he/she will be damn..pissed ..

I fully feel that instead of days the contest could be reduced to hours just like topcoder and that way it will be much better otherwise I have a feeling that some of the solutions are not entirely the coder's own work.. but I would rather call it collaboration ..and it's gotta be fair right Chef??

Hi Mohit,
Please note that only the Challenge problem will be rejudged. The other suggestions will not be implemented. The goal is to keep within the spirit of the competition (to find the best solutions to problems) and not reverse engineer test data.
Thanks,
Chef