
Facebook’s Hacker Cup Called A Failure - andre3k1
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebooks-hacker-cup-called-a-failure-2011-01
======
bretthopper
Most of the details are from this Quora post: [http://www.quora.com/Andrew-
Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Reso...](http://www.quora.com/Andrew-
Brown-2/Facebook-Hacker-Cup-Resounding-Failure)

Am I the only one who thinks Quora should only host questions and answers? I
hope this isn't part of a growing trend to have what are essentially blog
posts on Quora.

~~~
jamii
It looks like both the linked post and the quora post are complaining about
problems with the qualification round. There is no mention of the fact that
the following round was in fact suspended entirely after the submission server
fell over. There were still confusing problem descriptions, incorrect examples
and buggy submission pages.

It's a shame because it really had the potential to be a fun competition if it
had just been pulled off more smoothly. The questions were interesting and the
competition format allowed for the use of pretty much any method of solving
problems. The 6 minute limit was annoying at first but I came to see it as
part of the competition. It creates an interesting tradeoff between
development speed and correctness and allows people to solve the problem in
any way they like whilst still enforcing efficient solutions. The bounds on
all the variables in the problem are given so it is possible to test your
solution on the worst case scenario before downloading the input.

------
iqster
Yeah ... they had major issues. First off, the submit system was flaky (didn't
work with common browser configs ... e.g. on my macbook pro with Safari). They
had a 6 minute time limit, which caused a lot of problems. By the time someone
realized their browser config didn't work, it was too late to try another
combo. The questions were not worded precisely in some cases. And some people
were cheating like crazy ... putting up their code/test cases for other people
to use.

~~~
iqster
I didn't quite get the 6 minute time limit. For instance, I coded up one of
their problems using a bruteforce algorithm. It worked perfectly with the
sample test case they provided. But when I tried it on the their time-limited
test case, lo-and-behold, it took a long time. So ... what the heck was the
point of that? Since we had 6 minutes to upload the answer, I can't really
convert my solution to something much faster in that time period. Should I
have coded a faster solution from the get-go? Well .. that isn't clear cut as
we had 3 hours to code 3 problems. Oh well. I had fun coding and I have a lot
more respect for non-us programmers. Some of the kids coding on the contest
were absolutely amazing and far better coders than me.

~~~
phwd
I am glad you enjoyed it but I don't think you should stop. Try
facebook.com/puzzlemaster instead. The questions are slightly similar. The
community there is quite helpful and they have been doing it for 2 years. The
Puzzle Master (whoever that maybe in Facebook) is quite responsive when it
comes to telling the users of errors.

------
siddhant
Reminds me of,

 _Facebook is more like undergrad. Something needs to be done, and people do
it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject, or consult
experts about the "right way" to do it, they just sit down, write the code,
and make things work. Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time
it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens,
they fix their problems, replace bottlenecks with scalable components, and (in
most cases) move on to the next thing._

[http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-to-work-for-Google-
or-F...](http://www.quora.com/Which-is-better-to-work-for-Google-or-
Facebook/answer/David-Braginsky)

------
feral
The article is just about the _qualification_ round.

The first post-qualification round was even worse (I was a competitor).

I won't go through all the details, but problems included mis-specified
questions.

The second question - a 2 variable optimisation problem, set as a Starcraft
game problem, in which shield generators cost X and warriors cost Y, and you
had some rules about the cost/benefits of each - asked you to report the
number of _warriors_ to build, to maximise damage done.

Writing code to solve this, it quickly became clear that the sample answers
provided were wrong.

Mid way through the competition, they changed the question to require you to
output the number of _shields_ to build - which, of course, made the sample
output make sense. While they put up a post mid competition saying they
suspected a bug in the question, they did not subsequently make any
communication that they had changed the question, or confirm the error. No
text was added to the question page notifying competitors it had changed. No
confirmation of the change was officially made, afterwards. (You can verify
this independent of my comment by reading the competition walls, or googling -
the question was called 'power overwhelming').

Another issue - while they were technically correct - was where they said
input to the first question would be _whitespace_ separated, and give training
examples showing it _space_ separated, but then the test problems were
_Newline_ separated. While its debatable whether Newline is whitespace (I'd
say it is, but it typically doesn't match \s) this change from the training
examples to the test confused a lot of people - and its bad programming
competition form, to trip people up in the input specification.

Finally, due to the slew of problems in the round, they closed the round
early, without warning. This upset competitors who came to submit their
solutions, to find that the round had already closed.

AFAIK, they still have not clarified whether competitors from that round that
answered questions will progress, or will all have to redo it.

Communication - including on topics such as rules - has been sporadic, and
either via e-mail, or through posts left on the wall - sometimes in comments
on the competition wall, rather than in organised FAQs, or using the facebook
notification system.

Answer upload has also been temperamental for certain browsers.

But posing a programming competition question to 1000s of competitors, where
the actual question is mis-specified - that's a very big error.

Rescheduling the succeeding sub-rounds at the last minute also inconvenienced
a lot of programmers who had taken time out of their schedules to do it.

Its a programming competition, and its just for fun - but I'd like to think
they'd do a better job considering the volume of contestants, and the wide
external audience.

~~~
mdwrigh2
The qualification round actually had at least one incorrect test case[1] as
well, and I got 0 feedback on that one. I asked on the qualification page for
clarification, and as far as I could tell, no questions were being answered,
and mine was ignored along with the rest.

[1] The Peg problem stated that there would be no ties, while the second
example clearly had a tie. Again, they updated the tests, but only in the last
24 hours of the competition I believe, and with no notification to any of the
competitors.

------
theone
Yeah FB Hacker Cup surely had a lot of issues as pointed out. The thing which
happened to me was even more surprising. I participated in Qualification
Round, and received confirmations mails(2) as well. Later, I was able to see
myself in Qualification Scoreboard. But on the day of round 1A it stopped
showing me as qualified to round 1A.

------
matclayton
Certainly wasn't a simple hackercup. I participated in both rounds so far, the
first one was a mess, I tripped off the 6 minute timer reviewing the questions
on my iPad in the morning, without even downloading the input files! Maybe I
should have read the enourmos set of instructions before, but I did it for the
fun, and reading long t&cs isnt my idea of weekend fun.

The next round was even worse, thankfully I spotted pretty quickly no one was
solving the starcraft problem, an obvious problem to attract starcraft fans,
and there are enough of those in the programming community. So gave that a
miss and moved onto the others. Looks like most people got caught out on that
problem, which was a real shame. They need to reset this round and start again
to be fair, but I'm sure given how upset a lot of competitors were the server
load won't be the same next time.

------
biznickman
Lol ... am I the only one that remembers a test back in 1st grade that said
the same thing and everyone in the room failed.

Rule 1: Read all the directions first. Rule 2: Jump up and down on your head
Rule 3: Generate a proof which demonstrates that [insert random equation here]
... ... ... Rule 50: See rule #1 ... hand this paper in to complete the
assignment within the first X minutes and you get an A. (or something to that
extent)

While I gotta agree that the communication wasn't clear, part of me wants to
be the grouchy teacher which says "the lesson is this: read the dang
directions". This guy just forgot the 1st part which was: read the directions
first!

~~~
mdwrigh2
While I agree that a lot of the confusion could've been avoided by reading
more carefully, part of the problem was the dissemination of information.
Facebook did a really poor job of this unfortunately, as all of the
information was in multiple locations, and was not at all redundant. For
example, the initial rules were in the FAQs, some updates were posted in the
main group (Hacker Cup), and then other updates were posted in the Hacker Cup
Qualification event page. So if you wanted a complete picture, you needed to
check all three. And if the answer wasn't there, you weren't going to get one,
as they weren't responding to questions at all as far as I could tell (and for
fairly good reason - if you didn't filter out the non-official posts, the page
was nigh unreadable).

The bigger problem in my book, however, was the issues with the submission
system. I tried both Firefox and Chrome, and couldn't get the "download input"
link to function properly (I tried, left clicking, "save as"-ing, opening in a
new tab, etc.). Add the 6-minute time limit to this, and it was pretty bad.
Six minutes to get the download to work, run your code on it, and then get
back to the page, paste your output, and upload. Oh, and good luck eyeballing
your output to make sure you pasted it correctly -- the window you paste into
wasn't resize-able, and every line wrapped, so it looked like an utter mess.

Don't get me wrong, I sound rather negative in this post, but I love the idea,
and look forward to the next attempt at it. I was just somewhat disappointed
to see how the process went. And to be honest, I really wish they'd do away
with the 6 minute time limit, and add a time limit for how long your code is
allowed to take during execution. Though I suppose they have to restrict the
languages then. Perhaps a "can you finish the problem within the 3 hour time
limit" is sufficient for this competition then. As it is, knowing when to
optimize, and when not to takes too long to figure out in the 3 hour time
limit, so you end up taking a shot in the dark as to when you should be
submitting your code.

Hopefully Facebook learns from these mistakes, and comes back with a
competition that is just that much better. Also, if you're interested in the
problem solving for this competition, check out the Puzzle Master. It's great
fun as well.

