Does TopCoder really want to support and promote Marathon Matches?
No one probably reads this forum, but the following exchange occured on the blog post talking about reseructing the /tc home page. My response was considerably late so probably no one saw it. Well, here it is again.
tuff 17 posts Sat, Oct 23, 2021 at 02:28 PM
I don't see anything here that helps with marathon matches, either for new people that might be interested or people with some experience.
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jmpld40jmpld40
294 posts Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 01:46 PM
Thanks for your feedback! MMs will show up in the most recent challenges feed.
We can also consider adding a calendar somewhere to show them.
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RustyoldmanRustyoldman
1 posts Sun, Nov 14, 2021 at 02:10 PM edited Nov 15, 2021 at 09:35 AM
This has nothing to do with my friend, Jessy, although it just happens to be a reply to her post. I really love TopCoder and want to see it be popular and wonderful.
But this "answer" demonstrates the some of the problems that marathon matches have at TopCoder.
1, Stating that problems appear in the challenges feed is not helpful unless you are already familar with the TopCoder platform. The vast majority of theTopcoder Staff, apparently, do not know that, otherwise I assume some effort would have been made to provide an easy to find, gentle introduction to marathon matches.
2, Making a calendar with matches scheduled in advance is nearly impossible given the way that marathon matches are currently run. Again apparetly the majority of TopCoder staff are not associated with the mechanics of running of marathon matches and are completely unaware of the last minute nature of each contest.
As far as I know there is no promotion for marathon matches, no effort to recruit new competitors, no effort to encourge new competitors by providing tutorial information, no effort to supply practice problems, no access to past problem statements or even the names of past problems, no way to test a solution (non-locally) after a contest is closed (that gives a relative score against any other submitted solutions like we used to have). If there is some way to do any of these it is well hidden.
Even when there is a contest running there is no obvious way to find it. Saying that it appears in the challenges feed is not helpful to someone that is not a member and does not already do challenges. The matches are shoehorned into and well hidden in "challenges" system and the "data science" category even though they are typically not data science problems and the people that do actual data science problems are interested in "real world" problems and making money and are likely not intrested in these types of problems or recreational programming in general. EVEN THOUGH "they are in the challenges feed" IS THE BEST ANSWER GIVEN, THAT ANSWER DOES NOT APPEAR IN ANY EASY TO FIND PLACE ON THE WEB SITE.
There is a nice link called "competitive programming" on the new home page. One might expect to find some information or even a mention about marathon matches somewhere under that link, but no. It is a nice slick page about SRMs and how to compete in them. This kind of page could be the beginning of exactly what marathon matches need. Why doesn't it exist?
One should be able to Google "marathon match" and have the first hit lead right to some useful information.
There is still no obvious calendar for marathon matches. One of the reasons for this is that problems are not finalized until the last minute. There is not a large pool of problem writers and testers and there is no queue of ready-to-run problems that could be used for matches scheduled in advance. This has in the past caused matches to be rushed out of the door with insufficient review and testing leaving serious issues which degraded the contest (although recently this seems to have improved). As far as I know THERE ARE NO WRITTEN GUIDELINES ON HOW TO WRITE A PROBLEM so problem statement styles and quality are varied, although there is finally a nice template for writing a tester/visualizer that encourages some consistency, saves a lot of time and provides some new useful functionality (good job there, thanks, that is exactly the kind of thing we need). Please schedule matches well in advance with the problems tested and edited at least a month before the contest.
In the past I have complained about this suituation and stated that I believe that, because they provide no income, TopCoder management does not actually care about marathon matches and does not want to put any effort or expense into managing and improving them. I have received answers that "oh yes we really do care, it is very important to us and we will definitely address these issues" -- AND THEN NOTHING HAPPENS. I became so tired of this all-promise no-action situation (mostly with the quality of the matches when the platform transitioned) that I quit competing after being an enthusiastic TopCoder supporter for something like fifteen or twenty years. I still have some hope (thus this rant) that the situation will improve and marathon matches will survive and grow and be of high quality and I will feel good about returning to competition, but I am not holding my breath.
Comments
Some matches were delayed but usually "topcoder events calendar" has correct schedule
Also all current/future topcoder matches are shown on aggregators like clist.by
But when it comes to past matches it is almost impossible to find any info with so many dead links on the website
This is useful information. The information in this thread
https://discussions.topcoder.com/discussion/7583/marathon-match-training-resources
is useful information. Useful information exists, although there is not enough of it. The members that care about marathon matches are going to be the ones that generate and gather this information.
But searching through old forum posts (or wikis) to find this thread and other threads is just an unacceptable non-functional situation.
Whoever puts together the TopCoder website should gather and organize this information and put it somewhere easy to find for new and prospective competitors. There should be links on the top level TopCoder web pages. There should be formal slick tutorials, written and video. Otherwise the efforts of the members to generate and gather this information is wasted.
I think that EASY access to this information should be the top priority for fixing marathon matches.
Fixing the situation that we have where example, practice and all past contests (except one) including forums are completely inaccessible (or non-existent) should also be of very high priority. It seems to me that a stopgap measure could easily be done here by creating very long term practice challenges for every past contest since the transition, similar to how the ONE example problem is done. Perhaps there is a worry that all these challenges would make the lists of data science challenges too long and hard to search? Make a separate category for Marathon Practice Matches. Make a separate category for active marathon matches. They shouldn't be in data science anyway.
And there are many other problems such as testing is too slow, forums are not even readable until you make a submission, debugging is difficult and obscure. Are these so hardwired into the existing contest framework that they can't be changed? These have been outstanding issues for a LONG time.
Fixing all these problems probably requires a lot of work by a different set of people to design and implement a suitable system for running marathon matches, rather than try to shoehorn them into a system designed for completely different things. I suspect this can't be done by running a series of "challenges" but rather needs to be designed and developed by a team with experience competing in, writing, and administrating marathon matches and knowledge of TopCoder system internals (as well as being capable system architects and experienced developers of similar size systems).
Unless, of course, the objective is to discourage any new competitors and frustrate existing members so that marathon matches quietly fade away due to lack of participation, in that case the TopCoder management team are doing a great job already and can just continue to ignore the problems.
Happy holidays
I joined TC many years ago and quickly found as an (dare I say "another") old programmer with a full time programming job, that the shorter contests didn't fit in with my lifestyle and existing time pressures. The marathon matches hit my sweet spot of being able to tinker around in the evenings for an hour or two after a hard day's coding in the office.
Of course, I was never really competitive. The average TC member appears to have a lot more time than me and appears to be able to type at several times the rate the my old hands can sustain. Nonetheless it was fun to keep my skill in tackling problems that are different to the ones I see day-to-day and I generally managed to burble around the 50% level in the rankings even with sometimes just getting the initial code in before the deadlines with no time to optimise nor refine. I often used to wish that Marathon matches would go on for longer to give me the opportunity to have a fair bash at it, but it is what it is, I guess.
However, I never seem to find out about the matches until I get an email several days into each one. Then I have the unsatisfying spectacle of reading the problem statement and there are already submissions going in because everyone else has already been at it for several days. This has led to me essentially not being able to participate in even these events.
What would be ideal from my point of view is to get some email warning that a Marathon match will be taking place on a set date so that I can clear my schedule to the extent that I am able and then hit the match on day 1. This is what would allow me to start taking part again. The occasional longer timescale marathon match would just be the icing on the cake.
Thanks for the feedback, it is very useful. I have sent it to the admins. We are now releasing the MM calendar for each stage, so you should see the next few MM in advance. MM are now completed (and start) on time and are generally of high/consistent quality without too many issues. @wleite's visualizer framework has really helped in this aspect. We are adding some tags, which will make MM (past and current) much easier to find. We are trying to improve the promotion of MM, so they are advertised in advance on a number of platforms. We also looking at ways how to make past MM open for practice, but this will require some work.
Thank you for your efforts @dimkadimon. I know you and @wleite and other members care about the marathon matches and have spent a lot of time working on them. Things have improved significantly, athough there are sill major problems.
One thing I noticed recently is that a "how to compete in a marathon match" page has appeared. That is really great, except it is quite difficult to find it. There should be a link to this at the top level or at the very least on the "competitive programming" page that describes how to compete in SRM's. There should also be a description of the differences between SRMs and Marathon Matches on the competitive programming page. Lots of stuff at TopCoder besides SRMs are competitive programming.
I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inquire about an issue I encountered while participating in marathon the Topcoder platform. After the challenge concluded, I was interested in viewing other participants' submissions to learn from their approaches and solutions. However, I was greeted with the message “There are no submissions available for this challenge or you don’t have access to view them.”
I understand that there might be specific rules or stages of the competition that restrict access to viewing submissions. However, as the challenge has already concluded, I was under the impression that submissions would be made available for educational purposes, as has been the case in past competitions.
Could you please clarify the reason behind the restriction and whether there is a possibility for these submissions to be made accessible? Learning from other participants' work is incredibly valuable to me, as it helps improve my problem-solving skills and contributes to my growth as a developer.
I appreciate your time and assistance in resolving this query. Looking forward to your response.