We found out some more information about the 8 minute error from the regional. All sites but Youngstown started on time. The contest was essentially 5 hour and 8 minutes long, and Youngstown started 8 minutes late. The solution itself is not great. I would have preferred running 5 hours for all sites. Youngstown would have an advantage because they would be able to look at the scoreboard 8 minutes in the future from other sites, but it is a very small advantage.
But what I really don't like about the solution was that the judges were okay with it because no top teams were from Youngstown. I think that one of the key parts of a competition like this is that it doesn't matter where you start from, as long as you show up to the competition you are on even ground. Sure its nice to get preferential treatment but fundamentally it isn't fair. I realize that when there is some sort of mistake there isn't always a fair way to fix it, but I don't think top teams should be given any thing extra just because of paster performance.
At this point we aren't sure whether or not there is a problem with B, because the test data has not been published. At this point I'm willing to give the judges the benefit of the doubt, but I'll post more about it once we figure out exactly what happened on the problem.
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