I will preface this by saying that I was uncertain whether this was realistically a violation of our rules, and consulted with other Calc Group Members in deciding whether this was likely to be intentional or not. All that answered this question directly agreed that it probably was intentional, and thus worthy of reporting.
I evaluated this calculation of someone creating a crater some months ago, where after my instructions it received an end value of 9-B. Somewhat recently,
@Dinozxd edited it some, arguing from a new angle- despite these changes being comparatively very minor, they resulted in a volume increase of approximately 3x. I noted this, and said that it didn't matter much anyways because I felt his changes weren't right to make. He asked to at least redo the calc with a higher quality image, and I acquiesced permission to do that.
When he did this, the volume of the crater had still nearly doubled, obviously leading to a 2x higher result. In his post on that fact, he said that it was likely because his friend incorrectly pixel scaled the original image, that he was now scaling using an upright image of the character rather than a general calculator, and that he was now accounting for the bends in the character's arms, leading to a higher result.
Now, this didn't actually make much sense to me. No change that subtle should have led to a 2x increase in volume, and making the line representing the length of a character's arm
longer (that is, more pixels), should only have reduced the centimeters-per-pixel value of the image, meaning any lengthening of that line would in fact
lower the end result. The other two facts of the issue didn't seem to be able to cause this disparity either- the original image was crudely pixel scaled, but the updated one wasn't much better. So I took a very close look at what it was he was actually doing.
These are the two images of note in this case. The left image is the original used in the calculation, the right one the newly proposed more accurate one. As you can see, the right image is noticeably larger, and thus the same lines on either image give different pixel counts. Still, they are largely proportionately similar- obfuscated slightly by the use of too-fat lines (leading to a margin of error of around 10%), the left yellow line is correctly translated to the right blue line, and the orange line is similarly proportionately accurate. When I say this, I mean that the pixel counts are accurate, they upscale by a consistent factor of about 1.4x.
403 / 285 = 1.414x
380 / 266 = 1.429x
Noticeably, the red line does not follow this trend.
128 / 107 = 1.196x
Now, I hear you say, this is obviously because the line now accounts for curvature. But as I pointed out, this should make the disparity even larger- the red line should proportionately have the most dramatic change. The shortest route between any two points is a straight line, and we are no longer dealing in one straight line.
If you put this image into an image editor and check the pixel measurements, I've already said that on both images you'll find a margin of error of about 10%, the correct pixel counts will be within 10% of those reported. But this is not true for the red line on the new image- the red line in the new image is a whopping 40% off of being accurate, with the actual pixel count being
178 pixels.
Every calc group member who gave their opinion on the subject agreed that this is too big of an error to be actually a mistake.
I explain all of this to give proper context to the alleged action. This user created a calculation, and later returned to it under the guise of "fixing" it, only for the calculation to end up being twice as high as it once was. He preemptively blamed this on different methods, when in truth this singular error regarding this red line accounts for practically all of the difference between the new value and the old (I mean this very literally- the original volume result was 1.162e5 cm^3, doing the calculation with accurate pixel scaling from the new calculation we get 1.167e5 cm^3).
So. He appears by all accounts to have cheated the system, or at least tried to, to yield a substantially higher result. I'd like to hear opinions from other staff on the matter.