Google Code Jam Registration Opens Today
Bamfarooni writes "Registration for Google Code Jam 2006 opens today.
The event consists of 3 online rounds (September 5-6, September 14
and September 19,) in which participants compete to solve three
coding problems faster and more accurately than their competitors.
If you've got what it takes, and more of it than anyone else,
then you can take home up to $10k for your code-fu."
This is Google's way of recruiting the debuggers to sort out the problems with their programs.
perhaps you should ask google first? Terms and conditions here
Or at least poorly written. Want a chance at $165,000? Here's how: Google Code Jam 2006. This competition is a chance for you to use your skills and compete against top programmers from all over the world. Thats on the registration page. On the main page it's slightly different, first prize 10k, 2-10 5k and so on until it all adds up to the suggested 165k. True, it all adds up, but if you wanted to enter and were given a link only to the registration page it can be quite misleading.
All they say is that you cannot use TopCoder plugins or modify the applet, but do not consider it cheating to copy the problem statement into another IDE, do your development there, and copy the code back. In fact, a good handwritten (e.g. you wrote it yourself and did not get it from a TC plugin) regular expression or two should suffice to parse the problem statement into class/method stubs and test cases. You tie running that regular expression to a macro and you're all set.
Here is a link to a previous year's problem with a C++ solution. An interesting problem.
This will be the first year that Python will be allowed along side the traditional TopCoder languages (Java, C++, C#, and VB). I think it will be very interesting to see how Python, which more often than not get can get more done with less code and less time, will compare to the heavier languages like C#, C++, and Java. I wonder if Guido working at Google had anything to do with it?
Here is a list of 10 problems used in the google code jam india. This was found with with google query google code jam 250 (250 stands for the point value of the easy problem).
You can practice on similiar problems in the same environment in the topcoder testing arena. Register for topcoder here. Referrer rrenaud.