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I agree with your last remark. Regardless of the letter of the law, any ML researcher who could possibly win such competition should clearly understand its spirit. They had to know that they were training on the test data, a cardinal sin in machine learning.

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Exactly. This is machine learning chapter 0 stuff. To think a team of machine learning (most likely) PhDs innocently misinterpreted the rules is naive. More likely, I imagine the researchers felt pressured to obtain results significantly enough to let their morals take the sidecar.

Especially when you consider that the first failure mode should be to ask for clarification if you are unsure. It's completely unreasonable for them to claim they read the rules, and upon their singular reading of the rule, they were completely sure that the limit was for individual participants and not whole teams. That there was not even any microscopic amount of doubt that maybe, just maybe, it was for whole teams.

This sounds like they are trying to cover their malicious intent with an "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" kind of trick.

just growth hacking a competition, right?

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