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?"

Comments

Re:TopCoder

[Anonymous Coward]

It at least demonstrates that they have the analytical ability to evaluate a group of problems and abstract the common elements of those problems to reduce coding effort/time.

ACM

[fishybell]

As far as I can tell, this is run exactly like the ACM annual contest. You go in, solve a few problems, and go out. From what I can tell, the ACM is better because it only allows college students to enter, you go in teams, not as individuals, and it's sponsered by IBM, not Microsoft.

Re:TopCoder

[HappyKleenexDude]

"It's a few nested loops every time. It's either process this number using this formula, or sort this data." At the lower levels, perhaps. Their single-round matches are designed so that a large range of skill levels can compete. I suggest you take a look at some of the problems from the later rounds in the last TCO - they're all available online - and you'll see they're more complex than you describe.

Re:TopCoder

[Chromodromic]

Yeah, that shows who the best robots, err, I mean coders are.

Yes, I often encounter this attitude among those that suck at TopCoder. Well, if that's all there is to these "so-called competitions" then, you know, just make some "little templates" of your own -- be a "robot", that is -- and make yourself $50,000 in the algorithm competition. I mean, that's all there is to it, right? Just a few templates? All those other guys are just robots ...

Or, here's an idea, you might try stowing your ego for ten minutes, and actually trying to learn something. Because something tells me if you were in contention for the top prize, you'd hardly be calling the competitors at TopCoder, who've worked hard to develop their talent with algorithms, "robots".

It's better for everyone to think you're an idiot, than for you to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Re:OO-Centric

[pkhuong]

BTW, I forgot to add this to my first reply: Good programmers use the right tool for the right task. If a task is simplified by, say, dynamic typing, continuations, closures, backtracking or run-time definition of functions, why should one not use a language that responds to one's needs? From what i gather, the reason for the language restrictions in these contests is mostly that most of the problems would be too easy in many excluded languages.