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September 29, 2005
Submitting your solution
All solutions should be submitted using the form on the submit entry page, do not email them to us unless you absolutely have to (if our website dies under the strain for example!) Email submissions are dated at the time we receive them so you could lose valuable time submitting by email unnecessarily and it makes it hard for us to process the submissions. Please fill in the entry form carefully. If you think you have made a mistake after submitting you can submit again. We will always use your best answer for your final score for each Challenge. Good luck to everyone,
Posted by Harry at September 29, 2005 02:21 PM
Comments
If you wish to leave a comment please act responsibly. No personal or innapropriate comments should be made. Concerns about a comment should be emailed directly to us here. Hints about the challenges may be blocked or held back at our discretion. We reserve the right to refuse to publish comments without entering into a discussion about why, and to censor comments as we see fit. Please be patient if it takes a while for your comments to be approved.
We were a little thrown by the spelling mistake in part B of challenge 1. We decided to submit without correcting the error. This makes an accurate de-coding of the original.
Posted by: Zoe at October 2, 2005 03:09 PM
Er, I submitted the solution for part B about 3 times yesterday (from 1640 onwards) but still haven't got the confimation email.
Posted by: Simon at September 30, 2005 08:46 AM
Will we be receiving an e-mail to let us know if our submissions were correct?
Posted by: Rob at September 30, 2005 08:03 AM
Are the scores actually done on time taken or position? Because it really seems unfair if 500 people submit within 30 seconds, and you're 500 down, instead of 30. Also, what scalings are applied?
Can't you just publish your method of scoring, and the actual scores per team after each challenge?
It would make it a lot ewasier to understand how far behind the top team you are.
Posted by: Michael Bryant at September 30, 2005 07:37 AM
Yes the competition can be fair. We always scale the marks so that the early easy rounds count for less. Even a few hours difference at this stage will not make a difference to the final score this year. All the best,
Posted by: Harry at September 29, 2005 11:24 PM
Can the competition remain fair following today's events. Some peoples' submissions will have suffered tremendously and it may affect the outcome of the challenge. Should the results from this challenge be discarded?
Posted by: steve at September 29, 2005 09:19 PM
I hope my programs weren't adding to the destruction :P Although they were searching for the file /Challenge-1A.txt... grr.
I know that one team from our school managed to get their solution in before the crash, whereas we didn't (cruddy manual copy and paste). Will you adjust the scores in any way, or are the points gained at this stage insignificant anyway?
Also, how about some confirmation of submission? Maybe the page was still down, but it seemed like after submission, you only get a blank screen, (rather than an error).
Posted by: Ian at September 29, 2005 07:24 PM
We were all tearing our hair out at school when it wouldn't send in! At least it's fixed now though, which is the main thing.
I also had the problem that a blank screen appeared after submission, and have since re-submitted just in case. You explained what had happened but would the first entry have gone through or not? I hope so...
Posted by: Lucy at September 29, 2005 07:17 PM
A possible suggestion for avoiding this kind of thing in the future - perhaps each team could be limited to a few submissions per challenge (per day?). I don't know if something that drastic is necessary, but it would put paid to the scattergun submission approach.
Posted by: Robert at September 29, 2005 06:51 PM
i think mines now gone thru. this one was pretty easy
Posted by: jord at September 29, 2005 06:43 PM
What happened was that either our browser or your ISP had kindly stored an old copy of the webpage whcih it was obediently serving up to you long after we had changed it. Most people did not seem to have this problem. Next time try clearing the cache in your browser or restarting it. All the best, Harry
Posted by: Harry at September 29, 2005 06:23 PM
The first time I submitted the solutions the form disappeared but nothing replaced it. This was much earlier than the second time I submitted where I did get a message containing my submissions. Was the first submission successful or did it fail and lose my time? (I tried doing it with the morse code after my first submission, just to practice. And I decided to submit it since it was the same and it had spaces in it this time.)
Posted by: Jason at September 29, 2005 06:14 PM
We can't say it often enough, we really are sorry. Harry
Posted by: Harry at September 29, 2005 06:12 PM
yeah i did the same. its not fair though with some people entering loads of entries! obviously their purpose was to overload the database to make it crash which means slowing everyone elses entries down. its cheating! maybe they should be disqualified...
Posted by: claire at September 29, 2005 06:02 PM
I would have appreciated a bit more notice of this! Finally got part A and B through email 13 minutes after they were put up.
Never mind, hope the next challenges run a bit smoother!
Posted by: Ian at September 29, 2005 05:25 PM
lol
Posted by: also emma at September 29, 2005 05:01 PM
did my entry go thru? i sent it, only clicked once aswel:P and was there a spelling mistake in b?:S cya l8r!!!!!
Posted by: jord! at September 29, 2005 04:59 PM
We've just noticed after half an hour of saying dot-dash-dot... that accessing the website through http://cipher.maths.soton.ac.uk gives access to the text versions of A and B (with morse code translated!), whilst accessing them through http://www.cipher.maths.soton.ac.uk still had a "challenge A and B will be posted at 4pm today" on the text link. What the hell happened?
Posted by: Simon at September 29, 2005 04:51 PM
Emma, sorry about the trouble. We had the equivalent of a "Denial of Service" attack from some people launching very fast multiple submissions. We will process all email submissions from around that time as usual. Thanks for your patience. We will be writing to thos who blocked the server this time. All the best, Harry
Posted by: Harry at September 29, 2005 04:46 PM
did anyone else have problems submitting? I could'nt submit a correction to my first entry.
Then the website crashed for a while.
Posted by: m at September 29, 2005 04:34 PM
Is there meant to be a message saying that you have submitted a solution successfully? I have submitted both solutions many times, but a message hasn't appeared on any of the times. A message does appear if the username and password are wrong, though.
Posted by: Ned at September 29, 2005 04:20 PM
we have been having problems with the submit entry page so have had to email ours in. The website seems to still believe that there isn't any new problems to submit entries to. Does it matter that we sent it by email.
Posted by: Emma at September 29, 2005 04:15 PM