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LiveCoda, Real-Time Coding Competition

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mad-max-with-keyboards dept.

Robert Shelton points out this "debrief" from ESCI LiveCoda 2006, a live programming competition. From the article: "On Wednesday the 24th of May at Loop Bar in Melbourne (Australia) fourteen teams of programmers gathered for the first ESCI LiveCoda real-time programming competition. Possibly the first performance based real-time programming competition. Before a packed night club with live music, each team had just ten minutes to write a program which could correct a corrupted image." (Here's a mirror of the LiveCoda site).

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Not the first by Sarlok · · Score: 2, Informative

    Anyone else ever heard of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest? A live programming contest based on # of problems correctly solved in the least amount of time. Lots of fun.

  2. I was there, more info by enos · · Score: 3, Informative

    I went to this thing for a little bit, and while nifty, I don't see why thousands of geeks need to know about it...

    Anyhow, it went down like this: four machines with an editor common to all of them, with teams of 2-4 people. They were given a 200x200 image file consisting of simple rgb triples. (200 100 50\n100 133 212 etc, real simple). There was a transform done to it that they had to reverse. The ones I saw were some color rotations/swaps and rotations in increments of 90 degrees. The program had to read in the file, invert the transformation, and output the correct image in the same simple format.

    The teams could pick whatever language they wanted. I saw C, C++, Python and Java before I got bored and left. The admins had a system set up that it would compile the code at certain intervals and print out the errors on the screen, or the resulting image if it compiled successfully.

    The teams didn't really have trouble writing the code. It was no longer than a screen worth, and they seemed to get that in about 2.5-4 minutes. They spent the rest of the time trying to figure out what the transformation was. They'd try 10-15 different color rotations/swaps combos before the time ran out. They didn't get the correct image in advance, but they were all photos from around the Melbourne area and it was easy to tell what it should be.

    If I had heard about it with enough time in advance I would have taken some friends and entered... ah well.

    --
    boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
    1. Re:I was there, more info by Mr_Escher · · Score: 2, Informative

      I was there for the whole night and only one team had managed to finish before you left - in fact only 2 teams finished the problem on the night.

      I had a quick go in awk (solo) after the end of the night and in that language, which is DESIGNED for dealing with columns of text, means you can solve any of the problems presented in a couple of minutes.

      It's pretty clear you weren't there for long as your summary is not that close to what happened, though your description of the problem is spot on.

      Most solutions were a few screens long, only the awk solution I think would have fit on a single screen, only one team would have finished the problem by the time you left, and most images were not of the melbourne area, though some were. Unless you mean the new melbourne stonehenge :-)

      You should have stuck around, or asked if you could enter.