The goal of this competition is to build a system (using ML or not) which is useful for predicting how quickly pets will be adopted. Any information used during the competition should be realistically available at inference time for future predictions... clearly, the expected answer cannot be available at the time you're trying to predict when a pet will be adopted.
If one can excuse scraping the data to build a better model, I can't see how one can excuse this.
He wasn't really making predictions at all, just looking up the answer.
And the goal really is a prediction system, not something that looks up previously known answers.
One test a good of ML competition: Can it be solved by simply hiring lots of humans to make predictions without incurring significantly more costs than the prize money?
What value to the organizers, to society or to whatever are you imagining coming out of a free-for-all style competition?
I think the organizers now imagine that the result would identifying good, generic prediction algorithms along with identifying good AI programmers capable of producing general prediction algorithms.
It seems like the contest framework already has become a bit problematic through context winners just being good at contests and not otherwise achieving anything.
But what are you thinking of? There are already hacking competitions btw.
How? According to the article his model without the cheat rated at ~100th place, and the article mentions him cheating the same way before (by scraping Quora for some Quora related competition).