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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."
They did it that way to make it fair for the other languages. Otherwise, us Perl guys would dominate the contest.
... if they included some previous questions with their previous results. That way, you could know what these people had done in order to win the prizes they won. Would be much more interesting than a table with apparently meaningless numbers in it.
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.
Maybe they want to be able to read the code you've written, or perhaps they don't want their entire search engine rewritten on one line.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.