Isn’t the easy solution to stop making bots available outside the arena?
No, as it would be easy to just push a dummy bot in the arena just to be able to play against anyone else in the IDE.
The “only” solution would be to make every IDE game public (ping @TwoSteps 
)
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The IDE is outside the arena, so that would not be possible.
It would require a list of all matches, which you can filter by players (your bot). As Russian AI Cup is doing it on the profile pages.
Have a look at this one for instance. You see some games with “System” as creator and some from other users. But all can be seen.
And each bot has a version. When you create a new game, you can choose the bot version of a player, that you want to fight again. So even after submitting something worse, the previous bot is still available.
If you want to hide at RAIC, you have to play offline against yourself and can’t test it in the arena.
But that’s a 5% topic, I won’t even dream about having such a feature on CodinGame.
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Especially since the storage of replays seems to be an (probably financial) issue on CG side.
Another option is keeping it in the Terms of Service. Just add rules about fair play or whatever, and any top10/top3/winner can and will be scrutinized to hell to see if they did something blatantly against it.
I don’t think server-side coding will solve that, no matter how hard they try, it’s far easier to selectively cripple or hide a bot. If CG’s stance is against that behavior just make an statement. With rules you just need to manually check a handful of guys, not changing the innards of how 2000+ bots with N replays compete each other.
There will be a problem with smurfs and similar. A compiled smurf bot can be harder to detect.
2 Likes