Probeable Problems for Beginner-level Programming-with-AI Contests
Mrigank Pawagi, Viraj Kumar · 2024
To broaden participation, competitive programming contests may include beginner-level problems that do not require knowledge of advanced Computer Science concepts (e.g., algorithms and data structures). However, since most participants have easy access to AI code-generation tools, these problems often become trivial to solve. For beginner-friendly programming contests that do not prohibit the use of AI tools, we propose Probeable Problems: code writing tasks that provide (1) a problem specification that deliberately omits certain details, and (2) a mechanism to probe for these details by asking clarifying questions and receiving immediate feedback. To evaluate our proposal, we conducted a 2-hour programming contest for undergraduate Computer Science students from multiple institutions, where each student was an active member of their institution’s ACM student chapter. The contest comprised of six Probeable Problems for which a popular code-generation tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) were unable to generate accurate solutions due to the absence of details. Students were permitted to work individually or in groups, and were free to use AI tools. We obtained consent from 26 groups (67 students) to use their submissions for research. To determine whether Probeable Problems are suitable for such contests, we analyze the extent to which the code submitted by these groups identifies missing details.