Kaggle guys,

    Can you check if there are distinct teams belonging to the same users? Itś very odd that some teams always improve their score on blocks, always near each other...

Thanks a lot!

A reminder to all Track 2 competitors.  The competition rules clearly state:

" It is forbidden to make submissions under multiple accounts, or to have a group of people working as a team and making submissions under different teams.  Teams that do this after 4/20/2012 will be ineligible for prizes."

Kaggle investigates all suspected violations, which can result in your account being temporarily or permanently disabled.

Could you guys please check if submissions from top teams came from the same ip or at least the same region of the world? 

I wouldn't be suprised if teams cubic and infinite were the same, and there's also the cnic and other repeated patterns. Of course, i will apologize if i am wrong! 

 It has happened before and kaggle gave them a chance to just cancel the repeated teams and to merge the cooperative ones (http://www.kaggle.com/c/GiveMeSomeCredit/forums/t/1153/magic-team-migration).

At the time, Anthony Goldbloom from kaggle made an statement (http://www.kaggle.com/c/GiveMeSomeCredit/forums/t/1154/rules-and-terms-conditions):

We have made a slight change to the Terms and Conditions adding 3.6:

No individual or entity may share solutions or code for any competition, or collaborate in any way, with any other individual or entity that is participating as a separate individual or entity for the same competition. The foregoing shall not apply to any public communications, such as forum participation or blog posts.

We are also aware that the rules haven't been as clear as we might have liked. From now on, before you download the data for any new competition, you will be reminded that:

• you cannot sign up to Kaggle from multiple accounts and therefore you cannot submit from multiple accounts; and
• privately sharing code or data is not permitted outside of teams (sharing data or code is permissible if made available to all players, such as on the forums).

We've reached out to several teams about this issue. Please let us know ASAP if you have multiple accounts and we've not reached out to you.

If Kaggle required participants to provide information about themselves, such as name, geographic address, email address, telephone number, employer, educational background, etc., investigation of suspicious activity would be more productive.  With anonymous participants, it is next to impossible to enforce the rules.