ESPN and TopCoder Run College Football Algorithm Challenge

Mike writes with a timely link to a story about the ESPN/TopCoder Winning Formula Challenge, a combination of fantasy football and competitive programming. The goal is to write an algorithm to predict the outcome of college football games using a collection of historical data provided by the tournament organizers. The season is broken up into 3-4 week chunks that are used to evaluate the results. Prizes will total $100,000.

Comments

Re:Worst. Description. Ever.

[JMZero]

Meh. The currently running Google Code Jam let people use whatever they wanted. In the last round (round 3), there was 1000 people. 3 used Haskell, 3 used Lisp, 1 used OCaml. Of those, 1 Haskell and 2 Lisp users got through to the round of 500 (and one of those was reid, who could have advanced using baling wire and twine). The remainder of advancers used C++, Java, Pascal, Python, and a couple other boring procedural languages. One poor fool used VB (me).

I think a good programmer can solve these kind of problems in any language. Sure some competitors might be more comfortable in one language or another, but in the end the meat of the solution is going to be the same anyways.

For TopCoder, their framework and style makes it hard to support a lot of different languages. And in terms of whether they picked the right ones, the statistics of what people pick when they have the choice suggests that they chose well.