alt Hacker News> Catching a lab cheating specifically on my one dumb benchmark would be really funny.
Similar thing happened when TPC came up with SQL benchmarks.
If you're not good at TPC, your engineering team is no good.
If you're good at TPC, then (as a customer) we will actually include you in a bake-off benchmark for our specific problem.
Winning on it is the price of admittance into the game, especially in a crowded market.
But how narrowly you benchmarket matters, you can't just hard-code that specific scenario & not fix anything adjacent while you're at it.
For example when it comes to GPUs, the "Quack3" (sic) benchmark on ATI cards comes to mind.
Yea, I worked for a competitor to ATI back in the day and we were definitely Quakemaxxing. We were not so unethical as to try to detect the .EXE name so to put the GPU into a "cheating" mode only when that benchmark was run, but we did run Quake 3 pretty much constantly while trying to eke out a few more FPS...