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That's what I thought when I saw the challenge originally... maybe a better way of running it would have been to have each run be with a deterministic seed, and apply to all candidates.

That way people can test offline with random sequences, but the leaderboard runs have the same seed for everyone. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I think this would have lessened the impact of luck.

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The tricky thing is the code for making decisions runs locally on the contestants machine, so the first time they submit they can record the sequence locally and compute the best set of actions for the next time they submit. Even if the sequence is somehow tied to a user's account so they can't resubmit against the same sequence, they could do the same thing with an alt account and feed the sequence to a main account.

Sites like Kaggle usually get around this problem by running contestant code in a containerized environment server side, but even then you can get clever with tricks to leak info.

The in game leaderboard can use different, changing, seeds, and a final score can use a final secret seed.

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