Programming Championships and more

Talking about conferences, forums, congresses and lan-party, you can not deprive the attention of hacker and programmer championships. But there are a lot of them, good money is paid for prizes there, and in general, participation in such events is a very rewarding experience.

ACM ICPC

When:

Team registration ends in September

The quarter finals are held in October

Semifinal in November

Final in January — March

Where:

Each year the final is held in different countries.

Site:

cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc



Our list opens the International Student Programming Olympiad (ACM / ICPC or simply ICPC is accepted in English) - the largest student team programming contest in the world. We have already written about this event more than once, but allow ourselves to repeat. The history of the competition dates back to the distant 70s. All over the world this competition is considered to be quite

prestigious, because, in fact, this championship is held among the young programmer elite. Large companies every year closely monitor the ACM ICPC, watching the future staff, because one of the main resources of the IT industry is brains.

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The championship is held under the auspices of the Computer Engineering Association (ACM). Since 1989, Baylor University has been organizing the competition. At various times, companies such as Apple, ATT and Microsoft have become sponsors of the competition, but from 1997 to the present, the general sponsor has been IBM.



For the first time, Russia received the right to organize the semifinal Northeastern European Group in the 1996–1997 season, and since then, teams of our universities have repeatedly won prizes in the championship. The championship rules are as follows: students of higher educational institutions, as well as graduate students of the first year of study, are allowed to participate. Students who participated twice in the final stage of the Olympiad, or

five times participating in the regional selection are not allowed to participate. Each team has three people, for three they have one computer. Teams are given five hours of time and eight to twelve tasks. Note that from the level of complexity of these tasks, any programmer of an average hand will simply boil the brain :).

The winner is the team that solves the greatest number of tasks, spending the least time on it. Participants write solutions in C, C ++ or Java and send them to a testing server. What kind of tests revolve there, the participants do not know, and the task is not enough just to solve it correctly - you still have to meet certain time, memory, etc. limitations Each unsuccessful attempt to solve - plus twenty minutes to the team's penalty time (which initially equals zero), so trying and trying to win will not work.



ICPC Final

With cash prizes in the championship, the situation is as follows: the ICPC winning team receives $ 12,000. Teams that receive gold medals receive $ 6,000. Teams that receive silver medals receive $ 3,000. Teams that received bronze receive $ 1 500. By the way, this year IBM spokesman Mark Guein said: “The ICPC winning team will receive 12,000 dollars as a prize from the sponsor of the tournament, IBM, and all members of the teams that won the gold will be offered a job in the company.” So, the money here is not even the main thing.

Facebook Hacker Cup

When:

Presumably December-January

Where:

Online

Site:

facebook.com/hackercup



This year, one of the largest social networks on the planet (Facebook) announced the establishment of an annual competition on algorithmic programming for hackers from around the world. The competition is called Facebook Hacker Cup.



The first "hacker cup" (2011), unfortunately, has already passed. Registration for the competition was open from December 20, 2010 to January 10, 2011. The competition itself is held online. The essence of the competition is as follows: the competition is divided into three stages. The first is the qualifying round, which lasted from January 7, 2011 (at 0:00 UTC) to January 10, 2011 (at 0:00 UTC). Participants were offered three tasks, and in order to advance to the next round, it was necessary to solve at least one of them within 72 hours. Those who coped with the task were admitted to the first online round, which took place on January 15-16 (3 sub-categories for 3 hours at different times of the day). 1000 best participants were selected from each sub-round.

The second and final online round was held on January 22 (from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm UTC). During the finals, 300 best hackers (who received a Hacker Cup official T-shirt) and 25 best ones were identified. Winners from among the top 25 can count on more serious prizes than souvenir T-shirts: Facebook pays $ 5,000 for first place, $ 2,000 for second, $ 1,000 for third and consolation $ 100 for seats from the 4th to the 25th. The amounts are not exorbitant, of course, but they are likely to increase in the future, as well as free tickets to California and free accommodation on the Palo Alto Facebook campus. By the way

in the first Facebook Hacker Cup was won by Russian Peter Mitrichev, a frequenter of similar competitions.

Top 25 - Finalists of Facebook Hacker Cup 2011

Top coder

When:

September 25–28, 2011

Where:

Online and various US cities. Final Top Coder 2011 was held in

Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Site:

topcoder.com

community.topcoder.com/tco11/



Programming contests held by TopCoder Inc. are widely known all over the world. Part of the competition takes place on the Net with a frequency of several times a month (depending on the format), but annual tournaments are also held - the Top Coder Open and Top Coder Collegiate Challenge (for students) with an in-person final and impressive prize pools. Since 2007, Top Coder High School Tournament has also been established, that is, a tournament for schoolchildren. Top Coder competitions are interesting because there is a rating system here. The fact is that all the competitions here are individual and each participation in an online tournament influences the rating of the participant in this type of competition, which significantly increases interest and contributes to the appearance of excitement. The rating was coined by TopCoder Inc and in his image and likeness Test The Best and Russian Codeforces were created later.



But back to the Top Coder Open (formerly Top Coder Invitational). This is an annual individual professional programming tournament, which is secretly considered something of a world championship among pros. And, in general, it is deservedly considered - this is indeed one of the largest events of this kind, where the strongest gather, although anyone who is over 18 years old can try his hand.

In all, the Top Coder community numbers almost 300,000 people.



The competition is held on the TopCoder system since 2001 and includes the following types of competitions: Algorithm, Design, Development, Marathon, Architecture, Assembly, Testing, Bug Races and Studio. The total prize fund of Top Coder Open 2011 is $ 150,000 and 100 trips to Fort Lauderdale (depending on the category of the competition - either to participate in the final, or simply as an observer). The most popular of the competitions is Algorithm, the prize for the first place in this format is $ 15,000. By the way, the winners of regular online competitions used to receive money, but then the organizers refused this idea.



We advise you to visit the official website of the company and the tournament, where you can find out the details of both a general nature and a private one - for different types of competitions.

Google code jam

When:

May 6 — July 29, 2011

Where:

Online. Full-time finals, in 2011, held in the office of Google in Tokyo

Site:

code.google.com/codejam



Another popular, respected and rather old tournament is Google Code Jam. As you might guess, this company has been holding Google, the history of the event has been going on since 2003. Google Code Jam is an international competition, and among other things, it is used as a means to identify the best minds for possible work on Google. Yes, yes, it has already been said above that the basis and main resource of the IT business is brains, so nothing surprising. The essence of the competition is quite simple: there is a set of algorithmic problems that must be solved in a fixed time. What is nice, unlike most similar programming contests, participants in Google Code Jam can use any programming language and development environment at their discretion to solve problems. To take part in a tournament, you need to have a Google account, register on the competition website and take part in the qualifying round.



The situation with prizes at Google reminds Facebook Hacker Cup: the first place is $ 10 000, the second place is 2000, the third place is $ 1000. Places from 4 to 25 are paid with a symbolic prize of $ 100.

Google AI Challenge

Where:

Online

Site:

http://aichallenge.org/



The University of Waterloo, with the support of Google, invites everyone (and those who know how) to take part in a rather unusual contest. Cooperating, they organized a real war of robots. The competition was based on the game Galcon - real-time strategy. The game, in general, is simple: there is a two-dimensional map with planets, each of which is characterized by two parameters - the number of troops and their increment per turn. Planets can be both neutral and belonging to one of two rivals. The number of troops on neutral planets does not increase. There are still ships (on the planets or in flight) from which the fleet is formed. The goal, as you already guessed, to capture the planet and dominate the map. Game bots can be written in most of today's popular languages ​​- C #, Java, Python, C ++, Scala, PHP, Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, CoffeeScript, and so on. To do this, you need only the appropriate "starter kit", which can be downloaded from the project site.



The game has already taken part more than 4,600 bots from people from 112 countries of the world. Although the first Google AI Challenge has already taken place, and its results are posted on the website, the organizers have not yet decided what to do with the prizes, or rather, whether there will be any at all. The official FAQ evasively states: “Perhaps. We are working on it. ” However, money is not always the main thing, to take part in competitions of this kind can and should be simply “for the love of art” :).

PlanetWars Tournament as part of the Google AI Challenge



The future game will be about ants, here is a link to Habré - habrahabr.ru/blogs/sport_programming/130582/#habracut

CodeCup

When:

September to January

Where:

Online

Site:

codecup.nl



This competition is very similar to the Google AI Challenge described above. This is again the online battle of bots, only this time based on the game Dvonn. Here, unlike the Google AI Challenge, games are not played 24/7 - demonstration tournaments are held every 3 weeks. You can become a member by writing your own program and uploading it to the codecup.nl from September to January (specify specific dates on the competition website). Participation is completely free, just create an account on the competition website. The program is compiled and run under Linux, and after compilation it is necessary to undergo a crash test. If the test is passed normally - you are among the contestants. The submitted solution should be a single file with the source code of no more than 1.4 MB. You can write on Pascal, C, C ++, Java, Python, Haskell, Javascript (versions of compilers and commands are listed on the site). The contest is, in general, chamber, without powerful sponsors and huge prizes, which does not make it any less interesting.

ICFPC

When:

End of june

Where:

Online

Site:

icfpcontest.org



Competition with a long and rich history. The ICFP Contest is an annual team competition that has been held since 1998. The number of participants in the team is unlimited. The competition is traditionally timed to the ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) - every year a major institution is taken to organize the competition, and the event is always distinguished

unusual and interesting tasks. For example, in past years, participants had to face such problems as the need to adapt the alien along with his ship to life on Earth, control satellites in near-earth orbit, returning the rover to the base, and so on. The task is given only one, the competition lasts 72 hours (three days). The competition is divided into two stages: lightning round (decisions made during the first 24 hours are evaluated) and main round (all sent decisions are evaluated). The solution can be written in any language (the winners of previous years wrote in Haskell, Objective Caml, C ++, Cilk and Java), the main thing is that there should be no problems with its launch on a test machine. ICFPC prizes are quite modest, as this money is primarily intended to help the winners to attend the conference itself, at which the award ceremony takes place.

Intel's AppUp Developer Challenge

When:

Reception of applications for a new stage started on February 21

Where:

Online

Site:

software.intel.com/ru-ru/articles/iadp-challenge-3



AppUp Developer Challenge is an international competition for software developers focused on promoting promising applications that can change the users experience of working with netbooks and tablet PCs based on Intel Atom processors. Last year, 350 applications from various countries of the world participated in the competition, and our compatriots were among the winners: the “audience award” and the $ 60,000 prize were won by Russian developers from Samara Artem Sherstobitov, Ilya Grachev and Nikolai Cholakov with the game Alchemy Classic. Dmitry Ryzhkov, who took the second place in the Home Innovation Project nomination with the AR Home game, distinguished himself. His prize was

$ 8 thousand



The rules of the competition, in general, are simple: you must submit to the jury of the competition an application that falls into one of the following categories. "The best communication application", "The best media application", "The best information application", "The best synchronization application", "The best gaming application", "The best special application for France." In addition, applications participate in the Grand Prix draw in four additional categories: Best Application for Different Platforms, Most Elegant MeeGo Application, Best Tablet / Netbook Application and Award to the Most Valuable Developer. Here you can win not only money, but also insane things, we quote: “A fully paid trip to Antarctica, including a 700-mile excursion to the South Pole, or get a prize of 50 thousand dollars and stay in the warmth of your home” :). Also played out: the opportunity to attend the TED conference, take a five-day trip to Russia, including a supersonic flight on military jets, a trip to Comic-Con, and so on.

Pascal challenge

When:

Annually

Site:

pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/

This is an annual computer vision competition.

IPSC 2011 Champions

When:

Annually

Site:

ipsc.ksp.sk

Annual non-format tournament. Team participation, a lot of tasks, but the task checking scheme is similar to CodeJam, i.e. The participant must pass the test and must send a response to it. Accordingly, there are no restrictions on languages. One of the most "fun" contests.

Open All-Siberian Programming Olympiad. I.V. Pottosina

When:

Online tour will be held on October 2.

Full-time tour will be held from 4 to 7 November 2011.

Site:

http://olimpic.nsu.ru/widesiberia/archive/wso12/2011/rus/index.shtml

Russian programming cup

When:

Annually

Site:

http://russiancodecup.ru/

Russian Code Cup is an annual competition for the most powerful Runet programmers.

Take part in the Russian Code Cup, prove to everyone that you can solve world-class programming tasks and get well-deserved prizes.