Hi all,
I was not aware of this discussion. I recently added the problems of SWERC 2014 and they were moved to tutorial due to this discussion. I asked permission of the other judges to publish these problems on SPOJ, so I won't modify them nor remove the SWERC reference.
I was surprised with this. When I was more active on SPOJ, I don't recall seeing such a tight control and cheater hunt. It may be that I didn't follow the relevant threads on this forum, but I've always seen SPOJ as a training/learning platform. There are no prizes here, besides maybe bragging rights.
I'm not saying cheating is ok, I'm just saying that unlike sites like Topcoder, I don't see the need to invest the scarce time SPOJ staff have to x-ray user submissions (which I believe will involve a lot of manual work).
One thing I think you should be careful about is that people train for team contests and solve problems together, later submitting the same code. I don't think this should be considered cheating.
As everyone agrees, problems from contests like ICPC regionals do not belong to tutorial. As soon as SWERC problems were moved to tutorial, people essentially stopped trying to solve them.
A new section dedicated to contest practice and separate ranking would be ok. Otherwise I think these problems belong to classical.
I believe there is great value in reading other people's code. I suggested a long time ago in this forum to introduce this in SPOJ:
- Allow a user to lock a problem after successfully solving it.
- After locking, no further submissions will affect the ranking of that problem.
- After locking, the user can read other's submissions.
I fail to see any difference, besides, perhaps, 5min of googling time?
It is virtually impossible to remove a good % of the problems with publicly available solutions, so the grandfather clauses are the only way to go.
While a decision is not made (I see it's been months in discussion), I think problems should stay in classical.