There are a lot of people that have spent copious amounts of time solving these problems. Fewer than 1.4% of the registered Eulerians have solved more than 100 problems. Releasing the solutions for these trivializes their work, as now anyone can copy them (unless the assumption here is that solutions to all those 100 problems have been previously released on the net).
> Does releasing the Putnam answers make winning a mathematics olympiad less meaningful, after all I can copy those answers easily.
Yes, it would make winning a math olympiad meaningless if the exact problems could be copied by someone and submitted as their own. Of course this is not how written exams work, which makes your comparison meaningless.
The same arguments can be applied not just the first 100 problems, but to all of them. To me, seeing someone that has solved more than 300 problems is incredibly impressive. It would not be so if every Dick and Harry could copy them and submit them as their own.
Maybe the comparison is even more meaningless because Project Euler is not a competition.
Solving 300 problems is impressive, even if the solutions are posted online, not in the least part because copying solutions you found isn’t solving the problems.
All this means is that seeing a number on someone’s profile isn’t a reliable signal that they solved those problems, which I guess is a fine thing to take issue with.
> All this means is that seeing a number on someone’s profile isn’t a reliable signal that they solved those problems, which I guess is a fine thing to take issue with.
That's the crux of it. If one posts solutions online, then it defeats any competitive aspect of Project Euler.
