1. So your stance is that Anthony, the CEO and Founder of Kaggle, is mistaken about the rules and execution of the 2 phase competition that his company is running, even after 8 days of his company communicating back and forth in email correspondence with you?
2. In the forum you initially state:
"As I have been saying over email repeatedly over the past 8 days, and yesterday on the phone with you and the Sorkin, there is no checkbox to check!"
..then later state:
"What on earth is a checkbox doing on the submission screen of a two phase competition? There is no ambiguity - there is only a single file type that is valid for the final leaderboard file. Why on earth is your software not smart enough to figure that out?"
and later:
"I submitted exactly one final submission. At this point the checkboxes should not matter"
and in your reply above state:
"I did not check a checkbox because I did not believe it applied"
While I'm not familiar with all of the intricacies of the competition, conflicting statements like those have me a bit confused over this whole thing.
3. $30k is a lot of money, so I sympathize with you for missing out on that given that your algorithm is better than what the final results suggest. That being said, the other entrants that won competed using the same submission process that you did, was it just bad luck that your entry was not accepted in the manner you had expected or why did they not also encounter this submission bug?
4. Is this your first two phase competition with Kaggle? Was this competition executed different than other competitions? I ask as you seem surprised/confused about this "checkbox" that appears to be at the center of the controversy.