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TopCoder Open 2004 Programming Tournament

Posted by michael on from the free-if-your-time-has-no-value dept.

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?"

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. TopCoder by RealityMogul · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. ACM by fishybell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Wow... expired certificates and all... by Vaginal+Discharge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You'd expect that TopCoder would have uptodate security certificate. But apparently, when I'm trying to download the applet, I saw that their certificate expired in January. So I'm just supposed to trust them huh?

    From what I've seen and heard, the problems are not terribly complex, but instead they make you do them as fast as possible. How does this make people better coders? I'd rather spend a week on a really challenging problem, than to spend 30 seconds and write as many for-loops as possible.

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    "Glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever" - Napoleon Bonapart.