OJ Board

Well, on another thread (about acm solve site), Dominik Michniewsk raised an interesting question, that was not answered:

Some people (maybe I don't have right ...) creates more than one account - one for submitting all solutions for test only, second for submitting only good solutions .... It's not fair to me ....


On other sites, like acm.timus.ru, such practice could cause, that such user is pernamently removed from site ....

What is your opinion on this subject? Do you agree with such practice?

Not pointing names, it is easy to see that some people have more than one acount and one of them usually has an incredible (or should I say almost impossible?) ratio of submissions/accepted problems. If you follow the status you can easily see many pairs of accepted solutions, to the same problem, with the same time...

And what about teams? Do you agree that some people can submit a problem as an individual and after that submit it again for another user, as a team? After all, the same code is being used for different users.

This sort of things can really mess up the classification. Imagine that Adrian Kugel used such a scheme. Then everybody would go down one position! And about the teams, imagine if every country made an account, and all users from that country submitted their accepted solutions... I my opinion, that should not happen, and that sort of things (teams) can be seen by appropiate statistics (for example, a statistic that joins the problems of a set of users), and not by creating a new "double" account...

I, myself, only use one account, and because of that I have a bad ratio, because when someone makes me a challenge to try to make a better time on an accepted problem, I use the same account. I only created another acount to participate on online contests, as a team (the name of the account says that), but this account has only one accepted solution, that was made to verify is everything is ok (in this way, this account does not mess up the classification).

I'm curious about your opinions...

I don't mind if anyone using that method to get a good submission/accepted ratio. (That's why I have 5000+ submissions ) But what I mind is, mostly some people will first use an dummy account to accumulate a lot of accepted solution, then submit all the accepted solution in once. It greatly affect other people submitting at the same time........

But I also agree that, the judge may need to do some thing to clear some dummy accounts. For example, in the author ranklist, the 16000-17000th account are obviously dummy accounts created by script.

I also don't mind about a good submission/accepted ratio; in my opinion it only shows (if it is reached without cheating) that someone makes test cases for checking his program or proves the correctness of his program.

This sort of things can really mess up the classification. Imagine that Adrian Kugel used such a scheme. Then everybody would go down one position! And about the teams, imagine if every country made an account, and all users from that country submitted their accepted solutions... I my opinion, that should not happen, and that sort of things (teams) can be seen by appropiate statistics (for example, a statistic that joins the problems of a set of users), and not by creating a new "double" account...

I agree. If everybody would submit programs under several accounts, then the ranklist wouldn't be so interesting.
I think the classification is for individuals, not for teams. Team accounts are good for online contests or if some problems are discussed and solved together, but not for submitting own source again.

One thing I agree is that the Online Judge need to delete those dummy accounts.

For example: delete accounts with 0 submissions and have been inactive for 1 year.

I myself do not use "double accounts."
Maybe, to solve this tendency of people having double accounts, we can also create a ranklist page based ONLY on the number of problems solved. That way, people will not be so "jealous" as to other people getting better ranking.

Ming Han