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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.
--
We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
Mmm... Jam...
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
There was an interesting comment and rebuttal in the 2003 winners article on Slashdot that basically stated Google was above the other big corporations out to make a buck, because Google makes you feel good for donating time to their cause. Okay that was 2003. My question is that now Google has gone public, has the mood change very much? I still have a good feeling about them, and I use their services every day, including the search engine (GIS, web search) and Gmail. I'm just wondering if coders feel that $10k is enough money now that the profits have grown so much. I could see them offering $100k to the winner without batting an eye. Are they awarding enough to first place?
FTA: During the Challenge Phase, competitors view each other's code and try to "break'" that code by passing test cases through the submitted code, with the hope that the results are not satisfied by the software written. Breaking another developer's code is the most direct form of competition for a programmer. In this phase, points are awarded for successful challenges and deducted for unsuccessful challenges.
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.
Does anyone know if Jimmy Mardell was hired by Google?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The 500 participants in Round 1 will receive a "Google Code Jam 2004, Powered by TopCoder" t-shirt. The top five scorers in the Championship Round will receive the following cash prizes
Why don't they offer something like a job interview for those old enough to take it? Or even a job for the winner (with restrictions, of course)? Imagine how many people would rather work for Google than have the cash prize.
heh. thats all we need, people who can brag about how fast they can code.
only problem, when coding in speed, many people make more errors
its a proven fact that if you think through your objective 1st, and take a decent ammount of time doing so, you're more efficent.
in fact, i believe it was in the mid-70s that the us govt, thought about increasing the work day from 8hours/day x 5days, to 10hours/day x 4 days to make it more productive for workers.
Google Cache
;)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Why would I want to `grab some caffeine`? Surely a good nights sleep is more conducive to concentration?
Lets give them a Slashdot traffic jam!
I'm offering $2,500 to anyone who can give my a idea that goes on to win. I am also offering $2,500 to anyone who can impliment said idea so that it results in winning the contest. Any takers?
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Could somebody inform me as to why?
No Perl?
No Python?
No ("cool" hacker language of the day)?
How many real geeks are they going to attract?
I can see it now - something like the GoogleMail FS comes out of it, only to get blocked like the notifiers are.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Use Google for flooking up the answers.
yep, thefirst challenge will be to rewrite the TopCoder interface to convince it that it does not need 100% of the CPU...that 5-10 second pauses while your typing code should NOT occur...that in a timed competition it is not reasonable to make someone go back and retype something 5 lines earlier simplybecause the interface froze up...
I mean crashes are on thing, you would expect the connection to get lost occasionally (try every time I have tried to do a practice problem), but c'mon, who hosts a coding competition with an interface that idles at 100% CPU usage?
-T
Whee signature.
If you aren't going to allow any of the major dynamically typed langauges like Python or Perl or even Jython (if you're really stuck on those libs), then isn't it an admission that Paul Graham is right and that Google's programming contest is simply an example of subgreatness?
Seastead this.
See the /. article on Paul Graham's
Python Paradox"
Seastead this.
You can't find a web page for a competition sponsored by google?
Hmm, I wish someone would invent a way to search the web...
Sorry, but you have been disqualified from the competition.
I read through the various sample problems, and I see nothing at all resembling a "programming challenge". Sure there are algorithms that need to be written, but it's just that, algorithms and logic. Things you can write down on a sheet of paper in long hand. The only reason programming is involved in any way, shape, or form is because it's an easy way to test people's algorithms, not becuase it's a fundamental part of this "challenge".
I offer that a mathematician who has never in his life even SEEN or HEARD of a computer could solve these problems, all of them, without a line of code. How then can this be considered a "programming" challenge?
A REAL programming challenge would deal with the real problems that programmers face: memory leaks, error correction, fault tolerance, user interface design, maintainability, speed, scalability, efficient object model design, database schema design, etc.
It's unfortunate that people look at these contests and think, whoah, that dude must be some hot shit programmer to be able to solve that! But really, he could be a crap programmer (hell they offer VB.NET for gosh sakes!) and just took a whole lot of logic and calculus. That doesn't mean if you hire him he'll do a damn bit of good for your company. It doesn't mean that any project he works on will be in any way maintainable. In fact, more likely than not, any code he writes will be only understandable by him and will turn into a taboo "don't touch it becuase it'll break if you sneeze" mess that costs endless amounts of pain and money.
I wish for once I saw someone have the intelligence to put out a REAL *programming* challange. One that requires you to think about entire systems, about design and IMPLICATIONS of design, about the subtle balance between speed and stability, about the umpteen million things that divides the '1337 h4X0r who is brilliant but considers random crashes to be expected from the professional and vastly underappreciated programmer who's work is so rock solid that he doesn't need a pager for the weekends. THOSE are the people who should be getting the props.
2. Make contest problem related to business related objectives and take code to hired code "fixers" to intergrate into current products
3. PROFIT (and happy shareholders)
Sounds a little like the movie Antitrust to me, but who am I to judge, "Don't Be Evil" ohhh I mean Google
If I were google, I'd be a lot more interested
in what a programmer/software systems architect
can accomplish in a year than in a day.
A day is totally random.
Also, shouldn't the candidate's creativity
at originating novel ideas count for something
and not just their "well-studied code mechanic"
skills?
Spoken from the perspective of someone who used
to get ~100% on the portions of tests that I
completed in the allowed time for the test.
Unfortunately, I only completed the first
80 or 90% of the test because I thought more
like an Ent than like a squirrel.
So what was my ability? 98%, or 85% ?
I suppose for all those relatively trivial
problems that I have to solve in 1 hour or
less (strikingly few problems like that in
s/w eng. in my experience) I'm only an 85%er.
Usually I only have to solve problems in
real-time when someone else has screwed up
their planning phase (e.g. let's do this
live important demo before ever trying it
first.)
I think out of the code jam, google will
find very good plumbers. Maybe what they
need to find are software people who are
the equivalent of Rem Koolhas
or Daniel Libeskind (or Sergei Brin and Larry
Page). You won't find them entering
1-hour or 1-day coding sprints.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?