Dear Yilun, Competition Committee, and all participants:
I am Yingyi Zhang, the team leader of the ihun team. First and foremost, on behalf of my team, I extend our deepest apologies to the committee and all participating teams for the problem of “two teams”. This was our first time participating in such an international competition, and we lacked a sufficient understanding of the rules, especially regarding the specific regulations for merging teams. The rules did not clearly specify the time point at which teams could merge in the whole stage, leading to a misunderstanding on our part. We have done our best to rectify this mistake before this discussion.
I want to clarify that our intention has always been to submit an excellent solution through teamwork, and we had no intention of participating as separate teams deliberately. In fact, all four of us participated together in the first stage, but our performance was poor. The committee did not announce the cut-off line for the second stage, and we were not confident about advancing to the second stage. However, when we were fortunate enough to advance, we found that we could not merge our teams, leading to this mistake, for which we are deeply sorry.
Regarding the code duplication issue, we notified the committee via email at the end of the competition to merge our teams promptly. Last Friday, before receiving this discussion, we proactively contacted Yilun Jin via email to request the team merge or the disqualification of the Note1 team. Unfortunately, we have not received any response yet. It should be noted that the results submitted by the Note1 team in the final re-evaluation stage were actually the top-2 worst submissions among our submissions, and we had no intention of affecting the rankings of other teams of our problem. The low scores would not harm the interests of any participants.
Our team did not gain any additional submission opportunities or rewards due to this mistake. On the contrary, we submitted our lowest performance results to avoid any undue advantage. Our mistake lay in failing to complete the team merge in a timely manner, which is evident from our submission results. If the committee would grant us the opportunity to present our rank 2 solution at the venue, we would be extremely grateful.
Finally, we want to express our deep gratitude to the organizers for providing such a valuable platform, allowing us the opportunity to tackle real-world problems. We also appreciate our own hard work and relentless pursuit over the past two months.
Once again, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to the committee and all participating teams. We hope for your understanding and support, and we are willing to accept any decision the committee deems appropriate.
Sincerely,
Yingyi Zhang
