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That's not a hack, that's blatant cheating, their solution litterally looked at the anwsers. It bypassed the ML model prediction, so that's not a ML solution, which to my understanding was the constraint of the competition. And in the end, that solution is useless for the adoption site, since the objective is to get adoption predictions (the animal has not been adopted yet). I'm confused too, by how can anyone think it's an acceptable behavior.

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Their solution made use of the data available to them in a "prize" that was nothing more than a made-up competition for fun. Did the rules expressly say somewhere that one could not make use of available datasets?

Kaggle rules routinely restrict use of datasets to approved ones, almost certainly yes but you would have to check to be certain.

The prize was $10,000, not "fun".

I think you misunderstood that the team in question scraped prospective test profiles from the website in question outside of the competition data flow. They blatantly cheated the competition process using data that was not supposed to be available to them.

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