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TopCoder Open 2004 Programming Tournament
TAG writes "TopCoder just announced rules for this year annual international programming tournament.
The 2004 TopCoder Open, Sponsored by Microsoft will set as rivals some of the IT industry's top professionals and international collegiate coders. Software will be designed and developed. Seemingly unsolvable algorithmic problems will be solved. $150,000 will be awarded over the course of 14 weeks. 24 of the world's best programmers will be invited to compete live at the onsite finals in Santa Clara, CA, USA. This competition is 'Free'. Yep. Free as beer. Everybody over the age of 18 is eligible. So? What is your TopCoder rating today?"
Does anybody here actually take part in their competitions? I tried it and it blows. All the so-called competitions are the same damn thing over and over. It's a few nested loops every time. It's either process this number using this formula, or sort this data.
The people that have the highest scores have little templates built with all the variables and loops setup already, so all they have to do is write one or two lines. Yeah, that shows who the best robots, err, I mean coders are.
The ICFP doesn't require you to use any specific programming language.
q .p hp
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/proj/plclub/contest/fa
"What will the submission format be?
Your entry to the contest will be a plain text file in a format that we will specify in the task description.
You may write your entry entirely by hand, or generate it using tools in a programming language of your choice; we will ask you to submit the source code for these tools (if any) along with your entry, and we will look at them for purposes of awarding the judges' prize, but we will not need to run your tools on our machines."
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
One of the requirements could be to clearly comment the code.
;)
You obviously don't understand these competitions.
The tricky part isn't the programming. These are small programs. It's figuring out WHAT to program that is difficult - the problem solving portion, you know?
The whole idea is to write the code quickly and your score is based on the time it takes to complete it. So, how much time should someone spend on comments?
You'd have to somehow assess the value of someone's comments to offset the cost of the time to write them. This is would, of course, be almost entirely subjective and would add all manner of complications to the contest. Best to keep it simple, in my opinion.
By the way...as it stands, the tests for correctness, etc. are done automatically by basically unit-testing the submitted code. So to even look at the comments would require actually hiring people (and not just any people...programmers!) to sit there and look every submission. Needless to say, that's a LOT more expensive than running a simple shell script
As for why they don't support Smalltalk or APL...well, I don't know. It might have to do with the number of users. The languages they DO support are currently the most popular ones.
Their reasons could easily be political or technical as well though.
Unforunately you have to log-in to be able to read problem statements (registration is free).
p m=1315&rd=4711 p m=1972&rd=4711 p m=1986&rd=4711
For those willing to register and log-in to see them, the problem statements are at:
http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=problem_statement&
http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=problem_statement&
http://www.topcoder.com/stat?c=problem_statement&