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Google Code Jam 2004
cymen writes "Google's Code Jam 2004 is open for registration at TopCoder.com. Slashdot reported on the 2003 winner and Google has a Code Jam 2003 summary. Grab some caffeine and get hacking!"
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$10,000 for the winner, but the real prize is recognition amoung your peers. And it will help open source as well.
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have you ever done a topcoder competition? it's about speed AND accuracy. sure the fastest person gets the most points, but a) if your code doesn't pass their system tests you get ZERO points and b) other people can look at your code, try to find faults and challenge it. if they challenge you and your stuff breaks (takes more than allotted amount of time, gets a corner case wrong etc) they get bonus points and you lost your points. i think this is a pretty neat system, and i dont think it's advocates bad practices. remember, these problems are designed to be solved quickly.
To me, it's more important to measure the potential of a programmer, more than the experience of the programmer. Creating new ideas and systems does not require experience alone -- it requires a great deal of potential. Simply breaking and fixing code in a realtime setting is good for the day to day stuff (and that is valuable for Google), but when a customer or boss asks to you build something new and difficult, many experienced programmers answer with, "that can't be done" when less experienced programmers will try to do it, with limited success.
I did the Google Code Jam last year and found that they required a lot more than basic coding skills.
One question involved analysing sequences of resource lock and unlocks, represented by upper- and lowercase characters in strings e.g. "ABba", "BAba" and "CADadBbc". Given such strings, you had to write a program to identify potential deadlock conditions e.g. the first two strings can deadlock at position 1 because the first string will hold a lock for A while waiting for B and the second string will hold a lock for B while waiting for A. Of course the real tests were more difficult than this. I think that less than 10 people out of 250 got this one.
Another question involved graph searching but with the cost of node traversal changing with time according to a pseudorandom algorithm. My solution was only twenty or thirty lines of code but it took a while to think how to do a time-based graph search.
The challenge phase is fairly challenging (excuse the pun) as well because you only have thirty minutes to make all of your challenges and you lose points if you are incorrect i.e. you claim that a certain valid input combination will cause the program to fail and it doesn't. Thirty minutes is not a lot of time to attack the 30 potentially flawed solutions that you are looking at. You have to pick a set of likely flaws (based on your own design) and quickly scan each set of code for it. Then, when you find a likely candidate, you have to read it in detail to make sure that you aren't wrong.
My point is that the Google Code Jam is for more than experienced programmers who can quickly bash out simple algorithms - you have to be able to devise novel algorithms under time pressure and devise strategies based on the psycology of your fellow coders