Google Code Jam Winner Announced 325
Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual
Code Jam programming contest.
Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada),
third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia),
fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland).
Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."
Re:Anyone know... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:5, Informative)
US comes 13th out of the 16 ranked countries. Funnily enough, for all the outsourcing it gets, India is last.
my school career belongs to Jimmy Mardell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What language did they use ? (Score:3, Informative)
Now THERE'S a Polish Joke for you! (Score:3, Informative)
Google CodeJam
Onsite Championship Round
Handle Score
Yarin 569.58
ChristopherH 482.17
venco 359.85
tomek 331.87
Topcoders ranking:
Top 10 Coders
Rank Handle Rating
1. tomek 3450
2. SnapDragon 3285
3. reid 3169
4. snewman 3132
5. Yarin 3058
6. NGBronson 3005
7. bladerunner 2928
8. John Dethridge 2912
9. ZorbaTHut 2881
10. WishingBone 2858
Poland Rules!
Re:Anyone know... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anyone notice that the winners are... (Score:5, Informative)
Admittedly that's still only half as many entrants/population as the US, but the disparity is not as huge as you suggest...
Ponxx
WARNING (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not worth it (Score:3, Informative)
LINK IS PORN not GOOGLE (Score:1, Informative)
Re:www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited! (Score:3, Informative)
Topcoder runs tournaments (mostly to attract good coders in the first place) and then there's a separate page for component development. If you do the component development, you get paid. That's the stuff they sell to companies. The "component competition" you linked to is where they're throwing an extra bonus on top of the pay you get for a component, to encourage more people to do it.
But most people do the tournaments, because they're much more fun. There was a time when TopCoder was only tournaments; basically, they gave out lots of money and hardly made any. That, of course, had to stop, so now they have the components section too.
It should be clear why they have to have extra incentives like the component competition: writing useful, non-specialized code that companies would want to buy is boring as all hell. So most TopCoders don't participate in that part of the site, even though the pay is good.
The problems that are asked for the coding tournaments, like Google's, have all been solved before (that's how they have a reference solution to compare your outputs to!) That's not the code they sell. These problems are purely for fun. Look at the medium-level problem from the championship: given a polynomial, find the largest root. This is not cutting edge code that a company will pay for. Your TI calculator can do that. However, writing the code to do it, from scratch, in less than an hour, is quite an interesting challenge.
And if you consider yourself a geek, but can't fathom the idea of people writing code for fun... be very embarrassed.
Re:www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited! (Score:3, Informative)
LEVEL 3 COMPONENT AVAILABLE FOR DESIGN!
Note that there is a special component available for design this week. TopCoder is working with Sun to help provide the telecommunications industry with an entire set of APIs for integration with their business critical systems. The first step is to build a component for generating Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs). Check out the details of the OSS/J TCK Test Proxy component and contact Bill Blais (bblais@topcoder.com) if you have any questions.
The following design projects are now available:
Component Name/Catalog/Price/Deadline
Generic Parser/.NET/$252.00/11.12.2003
Lightweight Model View Controller/.NET/$402.00/11.12.2003
MSMQ Remoting Channel/.NET/$168.00/11.12.2003
Phonetic Pattern Matching/.NET/$336.00/11.12.2003
Spell Check/.NET/$336.00/11.12.2003
Data Set/Java/$201.00/11.12.2003
Financial Ledger/Java/$168.00/11.12.2003
OSS/J TCK Test Proxy/Java/$1,000.00/11.19.2003
For more information about TopCoder development opportunities go to:
http://www.topcoder.com/?t=development&c=ind
So there it is. Yes they do recruit for big companies. BUT it's for money, pretty decent money too. The problems you do in competitions are mostly academic in nature, but they use the scores to decide who to pick for the pay gigs.
Also you say, you can do the same thing at your normal job. Well, did you ever think that some people don't HAVE jobs, and this might help them making money until they find one?
Next time you trash a company that is actually trying to do something good for the programmer community, try doing some reading first...
Mark
Re:www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited! (Score:3, Informative)
I did the TopCoder contests for a while a year or two ago (back when they gave cash prizes.) There's the "Single Round Matches", which are what most of us would recognize as typical "coding competitions", and then they have some "component design" contests, or rather have an ongoing list of software components (for example, an FTP module or a module that accesses a database) that they wish to have developed and contract out to rated TopCoder members, including design/implementation.
The little components are the software they're apparently selling, but the coding competitions (like this Code Jam) don't generate any saleable technology/IP. Competitors in the coding contests are therefore not being scammed, and those involved in developing the components do so voluntarily (and are compensated, although not compensated that much.)
-fren
Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The problem with TopCoder (Score:3, Informative)
How did you come to this conclusion?
At least the FAQ didn't make you do it.
Do you really think this is a good way to measure the relative merit of programmers?
The ability to quickly code solutions to a set of somewhat simple algorithmic problems does not completely define a "top" programmer. However, our attempt to make TopCoder tournaments as objective as possible has initially lead us in this direction. We continuously discuss ways in which we might introduce code elegance, style, reusability, and other less objectively ratable elements into our tournaments. We'd love to hear any suggestions on how this might be accomplished.
Re:www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited! (Score:2, Informative)
The results of the programming competition are ugly; no one would want to use it anyway.
The component design/development competitions have a software engineering process around them and take several weeks. Winners are paid for their work, and everyone knows that this is being marketed -- in fact their is a provision for royalties.
Re:What did they write? (Score:1, Informative)