Friday, March 24, 2006

Google disqualified me

Ok... so i m back to blogger's world. Actually i never left it, i read almost all blogs on smr's blogroll. But i had stopped writing myself.
So lets come to the topic. Google disqualified from Google India Code Jam for no reason(not exactly).
Actually i used three logins during the contest. Now, I don't know how they found out that. But I m frustrated because i didn't actually cheat. My original Topcoder ID is(or rather was, its deactivated now:( ) was sandy007smarty. I participated using this ID and submitted 1 question for 230.95 points. Then after some 3 hours or so , i used one of my friends ID to sign into the contest. But this time i just saw the questions of this set and didn't submit any code. Again after 1 hour or so i opened another ID and again didn't submit anything.
Now, google says(they mailed me) that its against their rule to use more than 1 login. And, therefore I m disqualified.

Now how did they found out that i was the one who used all 3 ids? I guess they extracted out my internal LAN IP because i opened all three logins from the same PC. But if they are smart enough to extract my internal IP, then don't they have the common sense to see that i didn't submit anything from other two IDs? Also the other two IDs I opened 3hrs after i submitted problems from my original id. So there is no case of cheating. Also what if some other person had participated from the same machine(its a lab PC, any1 can use) then we would both have been disqualified? This is not fair. And this is the case when they took almost 16 hrs to eliminate all cheaters and still couldn't eliminate all cheaters(there are ppl with score >249 out of 250) and falsely eliminated me.

I m not the only case. There is a guy from Dhaka who has solved around 1500 questions of ACM and is a acm tutor for his college, and google has disqalified him. See this link.Do u think a guy who solved 1500 ACM questions needs to cheat to get through the qualification round. Let me tell u that the 250 point question was really really easy(i did it in 7 mins). And the cut-off was 91, which means a guy who takes around 50-55 mins to solve such a easy question has also qualified.
Whatever, i m disqlaified and would take care that i don't do such stupid things next time.
PS: I mailed them and told them to check my past performance in Topcoder's SRMs and see that I could easily solve that question without any cheating. But their reply was negative.

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