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Favorite Programming Contests?
SandSpider asks: "Sometimes, the daily grind of programming can wear a person down. Sometimes, people need challenges to expand their abilities and outlook. My personal favorite is the ADHOC/MacHack Showcase, where you spend up to 48 hours straight programming something impressive, perhaps with the conference theme, perhaps no. Sure, there's no prize, but it's the recognition from other programmers that makes it worthwhile. What is everyone else's favorite programming competition, and what did you do for it?"
International Obfuscated C Code Contest
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
By far The daily WTF (Despite the name it is work safe). I check that every morning, and if I still haven't won I know I'm safe to program today, otherwise I change careers to something that doesn't involve computers.
Challenge 24. [http://www.challenge24.org/
And, of course, IOI [http://www.ioi2005.pl/
Write some code and you win your job!
Ok, so it's not something you are looking forward to winning, or ever knowing you 'won' for that matter.
We have all made our WTFs but the entries here are real winners :)
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
i have to admit i have never gone to the trouble(well it may not be trouble) to set it up and try this, but competitions like this seem like theyd push the way i think... sure sems like a nice escape from my typical DB business app...
a nd-Computer-Science/6-370January--IAP--2005/Course Home/index.htm
http://robocraft.mit.edu/
or
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-
http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/
:)
No language restrictions, very interesting problems. quite prestigious to win. it is great!
The only downside is that it is only once a year. It is fun to do it in a language you don't know as a forced crash course too if you don't expect to win.
It starts this weekend! so start preparing.
http://notanumber.net/
Personally, after I've gotten worn out by much programming, the challenging thing I do is that I go on vacation, and not one of those stressful "let's make sure we see 150 different tourist attractions per day" kind. I'm talking the sit down and rest and go swimming in the ocean/lake/hotel's pool kind.
Works pretty well for me. Coding for 48 hours straight for no money doesn't really sound too relaxing or enticing to me.
Random and weird software I've written.
Perl Golf, http://terje.perlgolf.org/, used to be my favourite programming related past time activity couple of years ago, when I programmed with Perl. Even though I haven't programmed with Perl in a log time, I still think that the Perl Golf is one of the coolest contest around.
bash.org
and then i said that the deadline for the oxford coding competition was valentines day, they were like, "do you geeks have weird alternative holidays for every thing?"
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Advice: on VPS providers
This contest has already been slashdotted, but the idea is sublime: "write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must...do something subtly evil." And the prize is beer!
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
I enter circuit cellar contests whenever I can. The development kits alone are worth the cost of a one year subscription (Linky! *looks at the 60Mhz ARM board and tries to come up with a project idea* --buddy
There are a lot of microcontroller/hardware programming contests.
:)
It is programming on a small scale, but it also involves building some hardware. If you are burnt out on programming, working with your hands on real hardware is a great way to relax. It is also fun to work on the nitty gritty low level stuff if you are used to high-level languages. (or vice versa). When it comes to languages it is Haskell or Assembly for me, anything in between would just be mediocre
There are a lot of PIC, Amtel, or other microcontroller contests out there.
http://www.circuitcellar.com/ hosts regular contests with big cash prizes
http://piclist.com/techref/piclist/pcbcontest.htm is a monthly PIC one.
anyone have any other good ones?
http://notanumber.net/
Each year, every ACM chapter holds a student-run, student-participation contest, devoted to caffiene-induced haziness in algorithms... and neat stuff like that.
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/
ACSL, the American Computer Science League, is an international programming competition for high school students. Despite it's name, it has become an international competition that many students around the world enter. It contains two parts. The first has your team of 3 or 5 people (depending on which division you are in) program 3 or 5 programs as a team that solve given problems. The second part is a written multiple choice test that quizes many basic programming skills from basic data structures to analyzing code. The prizes this year were quite amazing as well. Our team took 6th place internationally and we each recieved a copy of MS Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional, along with numerous books/games from individual-based prizes. IIRC, the top few teams recieved pocket PCs for each member.
I'll second the OP's favorite. I've only attended for two years, but it's a great conference. I'm for sure going again this year.
I came in second place two years ago in the showcase by teaming up with someone else to write a networked Pong game that literally played across the screens. The paddles were on the end computers, and the ball would bounce across all the computers between it. It hovered over the desktop, which we demonstrated by showing a QuickTime movie playing in the background on one of the computers. I think the best part was that the text showing the score spanned all the computers hooked up. We called it AirPong, because we happened to be networked over Airport.
However, the winner's entry was great. It was Unstoppable Progress bars, a haxie that turned the system progress bars, which fill up with "aqua" colored liquid, into un-capped bars that would spill out and fill up the window.
It's a great experience with developers gathering in the atrium of the hotel and teaming up as needed to create really great things.
If you're a Mac/UNIX programmer, or are even remotely interested in it, I highly recommend it.
My favorite MacHack was the one done by Dean Yu that blasted a random inflammatory sound ("ouch!") for each error spewed while compiling under MPW. Come to think of it, Dean did a whole bunch of my favorite hacks.
I've gotta think of a good hack to do this year.
(keeps thinking the same thing year after year)
We called the event "Crash and Compile". It was run as a pretty standard ACM style programming contest, all coding done through terminals on the VAX (running 4.2 BSD IIRC), but with the handicap that an alcoholic beverage had to be consumed before every compile. Who "won" is a matter of debate, but it was fun watching our valedictorian stumble out of the lab. Several foreign grad students joined in when we told them what we were up too, apologizing for disruption and all.
Just as we were setting up an assistant dean stuck his head in the lab (it was Saturday night at 8:30pm), but luckily the beverages were still in the bag.
This type of thing would be too risky at a university in America today. This was back in the 80's. Just the booze on campus would be enough to get you disciplined today, let alone in a computer lab.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
I prefer competitions that involve short problems.
Top Coder is a very large event, with thousands of participants. They have weekly-ish small competitions, and multiple times per year they have cash prizes ranging from $1000 to $100000.
Sphere Online Judge is another great competition, although far smaller and with no real time limit. No prizes, but much more varied and fun problems, with a HUGE selection of programming languages and completely automated judging.
Universidad de Valladolid has a large archive of programming problems. The online judge allows C, C++, Java, and Pascal.
http://acm.uva.es/problemset/
For those who dont know, the ACM programming competition that is held on a world wide scale is the de-facto programming competition for bachelors (other than TopCoder, which is not limited to college students I think, but it is not organized on such a massive scale as ACM)
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac
PDRoms Coding Competition 3.33 is going on right now, check it out if you want. I'm too busy to participate this time, myself.
The yearly MiniGame Compo is great too. I've written 1kB and 4kB games in previous years, they didn't rank too well but they were a lot of fun to write.
7 years ago they were getting ready to rebuild the Baby Manchester Mark I computer, a vintage late-1940s early PC.
They wrote a simulator, several actually (here's one that's still online)
, for a 32-word x 32-bit-per-word computer. Each word had 5 address bits and 3 instruction bits, the rest was user-defined. Optionally, you could treat a word as 32 bits of user-defined data. The best program won a prize, everone else got a written certificate of thanks.
The winning entry? A noodle-timer. Congrats again to Yasuaki Watanabe of Japan.
Programming in the small is a lot more challenging that it looks, especially if you have a problem that naturally fits in 33 words and all you have is 32.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.