That's a good point. Both can lead to good things and bad things, and my argument is that releasing some test cases brings a similar (if not even greater) proportion of good as releasing GCC (or GDB, to make it more on-topic).
What's the worst case scenario? A bunch of people will "fix" their programs to pass the test cases while still being wrong, whereas they probably couldn't have fixed them at all without the test data. They will achieve nothing and nobody will lose anything. But a lot of people will find what they did wrong, learn from their mistakes, and be better prepared for the next competition. Some beginners may even learn how to debug their code through this process, which is arguably a more important skill than writing code. With GCC, the worst case scenario might be an exploit that takes over a majority of the computers in the world, and brings down banking and telecommunications. I still think it does a lot more good than harm overall. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-code+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to google-code@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/4a102fb4-7e93-41c4-aeba-648dbb79f907%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
