I went to a computer science department event at Rutgers today, mostly to see what was there. Ended up talking to a student running the competitive coding club, and asked him how they handle AI assistance in their contests. His answer was straightforward. At the in-person events they enforce no-assistance rules and the rules hold. For the online events, he said, there really isn't much they can do.

The same club, same students, and same week... but two different behaviors.

What struck me wasn't that the online rule fails. (Because of course it does.) It's that nobody there is confused about why. The standard holds exactly where something holds it, and where nothing does, it doesn't. They know this, and they run both formats anyway, because the in-person one is worth protecting even if it only covers part of what they do.

Which also means the two formats are not producing the same kind of result. The in-person contests measure what they claim to measure. The online ones measure something else, and everyone involved knows it. I find myself wondering how often the enforcement mechanism gets described when coding results are cited.

He also asked, about the people working around it, "what did they really win?" A perceptive question, and I was more encouraged by that conversation than I expected to be.