It seems like it would have been so easy for them to test programs against the failure case in the same way @yuvadm did. Just make it part of the competition rules that if an application solves the problem with quantum calls replaced with a random number generator, then it's not demonstrating true quantum improvement and is disqualified.
They said up front in the rules that they didn't want Failing With Style approaches to win, so why didn't they explicitly test for that?
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