Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chriskw 261 days ago
The tricky thing is the code for making decisions runs locally on the contestants machine, so the first time they submit they can record the sequence locally and compute the best set of actions for the next time they submit. Even if the sequence is somehow tied to a user's account so they can't resubmit against the same sequence, they could do the same thing with an alt account and feed the sequence to a main account.

Sites like Kaggle usually get around this problem by running contestant code in a containerized environment server side, but even then you can get clever with tricks to leak info.

1 comments

The in game leaderboard can use different, changing, seeds, and a final score can use a final secret seed.