There was also an article in DDJ about programming contests a couple of months back. It is an interesting read, but there is nothing new in there for those who are already familiar with TopCoder.
Showing posts with label topcoder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label topcoder. Show all posts
2008-07-02
Major Programming Contests This Month
There are a couple of major programming contests coming up this month. The first one is the ICFP Programming Contest 2008 (11-14 July). The second one is the Google Code Jam 2008 (qualification round on 16 July).
There was also an article in DDJ about programming contests a couple of months back. It is an interesting read, but there is nothing new in there for those who are already familiar with TopCoder.
There was also an article in DDJ about programming contests a couple of months back. It is an interesting read, but there is nothing new in there for those who are already familiar with TopCoder.
2006-09-27
ICFPC 2006: Epilogue
The results of the ICFP contest for 2006 are now available. "Team Smartass" came first, followed by "kuma-" and "You Can't Spell Awesome Without ASM" in the second and third places respectively. Amazingly, the lone hacker "Witrala" was able to take the fifth place. Congratulations!
There is also a a video of the presentation by the contest's organisers at ICFP 2006. It is quite shaky, there are audio and video synchronisation problems and there is a guy sitting near the camera who gets tickled by almost everything into laughing out loud, but it is still worth a watch, especially for those who participated in the contest or those who want to know just how the organisers created the task.
This year's contest has proved to be so popular that the organisers have created a separate site called boundvariable.org dedicated to the "Cult of the Bound Variable".
An interesting bit about this year's contest was that the teams in the first and the third places were both from Google. Another interesting bit is that the individual members of these teams are also ranked very high on TopCoder and have been toppers in various contests organised by TopCoder. "Team Smartass" comprised Christopher Hendrie (ChristopherH), Derek Kisman (SnapDragon), Ambrose Feinstein (ambrose) and Daniel Wright (dmwright). "You Can't Spell Awesome Without ASM" comprised John Dethridge (John Dethridge), Ralph Furmaniak (RalphFurmaniak), Tomasz Czajka (tomek) and Reid Barton (reid).
Update (2006-10-22): Yumpee has pointed me to the ICFP 2006 paper (PDF) written by the organisers.
There is also a a video of the presentation by the contest's organisers at ICFP 2006. It is quite shaky, there are audio and video synchronisation problems and there is a guy sitting near the camera who gets tickled by almost everything into laughing out loud, but it is still worth a watch, especially for those who participated in the contest or those who want to know just how the organisers created the task.
This year's contest has proved to be so popular that the organisers have created a separate site called boundvariable.org dedicated to the "Cult of the Bound Variable".
An interesting bit about this year's contest was that the teams in the first and the third places were both from Google. Another interesting bit is that the individual members of these teams are also ranked very high on TopCoder and have been toppers in various contests organised by TopCoder. "Team Smartass" comprised Christopher Hendrie (ChristopherH), Derek Kisman (SnapDragon), Ambrose Feinstein (ambrose) and Daniel Wright (dmwright). "You Can't Spell Awesome Without ASM" comprised John Dethridge (John Dethridge), Ralph Furmaniak (RalphFurmaniak), Tomasz Czajka (tomek) and Reid Barton (reid).
Update (2006-10-22): Yumpee has pointed me to the ICFP 2006 paper (PDF) written by the organisers.
2005-04-15
Miscellany
Paul Brook has created a Free replacement for kqemu called qvm86. Both are Linux kernel modules that enable QEMU to run guest operating systems at near-native speeds. kqemu is unfortunately closed-source though it is free of cost for non-commercial use.
SRM-238 was only slightly less worse than SRM-236. Muddled thinking ("coder's block"?) once again ensured that I could solve only one of the problems in the given time. I really suck as a coder. I should also stop writing about SRMs.
Mark Wielaard has written a nice article on GCJ in LWN.net. I did not completely grok Nathan Myers's (ncm) problems with the design of the Java language as written in the comments section for that article. Ditto for Jamie Zawinski's problems with Java for that matter. I have a long way to go before I can even begin to understand some of the objections people have for the design of programming language.
It sucks big time that gtkhtml requires the whole GNOME schmear. Unwieldy dependencies seem to be the general rule in Gtk/GNOME-land. Time to learn Qt.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
SRM-238 was only slightly less worse than SRM-236. Muddled thinking ("coder's block"?) once again ensured that I could solve only one of the problems in the given time. I really suck as a coder. I should also stop writing about SRMs.
Mark Wielaard has written a nice article on GCJ in LWN.net. I did not completely grok Nathan Myers's (ncm) problems with the design of the Java language as written in the comments section for that article. Ditto for Jamie Zawinski's problems with Java for that matter. I have a long way to go before I can even begin to understand some of the objections people have for the design of programming language.
It sucks big time that gtkhtml requires the whole GNOME schmear. Unwieldy dependencies seem to be the general rule in Gtk/GNOME-land. Time to learn Qt.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-04-04
SRM-236
Yet another miserable performance from yours truly. The first problem was to find out the task finally left from a set of tasks after the n-th task (assuming the list is circular) is removed and the process repeatedly applied till there is only one left. I took too much time on this one, all because of a rather silly off-by-one error. The second problem was to find the n-th smallest Hamming number given a set of factors. If X1,..,Xn are the given factors, a Hamming number is X1^P1 * ... * Xn^Pn, where Pi >= 0. For example, for 2 and 3, the Hamming numbers are 1,2,3,4,6,8,9,.... My brute-force solution was too slow and timed out for large values. I could not finish this one before the deadline and thus could not attempt the third problem.
Naturally, my rating fell yet again, but the good thing is that I'm back in Division 2 where I should at least get easier problems.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
Naturally, my rating fell yet again, but the good thing is that I'm back in Division 2 where I should at least get easier problems.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-03-23
SRM-235
This morning I took part in my second TopCoder Single Round Match (SRM) - "SRM-235". Because of my rating from the previous match, I got to compete in Division 1 this time, which translated to tougher problems and competitors. Alas, I did pathetically in this match with my final score being zero!
Once again, the two problems that I had a chance to try out were not that difficult, but sloppy coding and muddled thinking made sure that my submissions would fail. The 300-point problem was to find out the minimum positive or negative steps needed by a stepping motor to reach any of the given target positions from a given current position. On this problem, integer overflow and underflow proved to be my undoing.
The 400-point problem was to find out the centre of gravity of a perforated rectangular sheet with rectangular holes. Here my solution just did not come close enough to the official solutions and I kept tweaking the multiplications and casts in my solution to match the results. After some time I even converted my solution over to fixed-point instead of floating-point, but it was still a bit off the mark. Such fiddling around ensured that I could not submit the solution in time, let alone attempt the 900-point problem.
My rating has dropped after this match, but still not enough to get me out of the darn Division 1. I look forward to being mauled once again in the next SRM on April 2.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
Once again, the two problems that I had a chance to try out were not that difficult, but sloppy coding and muddled thinking made sure that my submissions would fail. The 300-point problem was to find out the minimum positive or negative steps needed by a stepping motor to reach any of the given target positions from a given current position. On this problem, integer overflow and underflow proved to be my undoing.
The 400-point problem was to find out the centre of gravity of a perforated rectangular sheet with rectangular holes. Here my solution just did not come close enough to the official solutions and I kept tweaking the multiplications and casts in my solution to match the results. After some time I even converted my solution over to fixed-point instead of floating-point, but it was still a bit off the mark. Such fiddling around ensured that I could not submit the solution in time, let alone attempt the 900-point problem.
My rating has dropped after this match, but still not enough to get me out of the darn Division 1. I look forward to being mauled once again in the next SRM on April 2.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-03-17
SRM-234
This morning I took part in my first TopCoder Single Round Match (SRM) - "SRM-234". I liked the experience and would like to take part in more of these, time permitting.
The 250-point problem was a simple "find the length of the longest contiguous string of either As or Bs in the input". The 500-point problem was to find the sequence of unit fractions ("1/n") in descending order that add together to yield the given fraction "x/y". The 1000-point problem was to find the derivations needed to get to the input string given the productions of a simple non-left-recursive grammar.
The problems (as I have also noticed in the practice rooms) were not difficult per se, but had to be solved "correctly enough" within the given 75-minutes - much less if you also want to get a good score and ranking.
It does not really matter if your code or design is elegant as long as it manages to pass all system tests as well as the challenges that other coders might throw at it. The permissible input is also severely restrained so that you do not usually have to worry about validating it.
One thing I noticed is that there were not many Indians among the toppers, while there were quite a few people from Poland. This is quite weird as I have met quite a few good Indian coders. Perhaps the lack of awareness, the lack of an enthusiasm for such competitions, the lack of decent net connections, the weird timings of the matches when converted to IST, etc. play a role. If you are an Indian coder reading this, please do consider taking part in these matches and letting your friends know about it.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
The 250-point problem was a simple "find the length of the longest contiguous string of either As or Bs in the input". The 500-point problem was to find the sequence of unit fractions ("1/n") in descending order that add together to yield the given fraction "x/y". The 1000-point problem was to find the derivations needed to get to the input string given the productions of a simple non-left-recursive grammar.
The problems (as I have also noticed in the practice rooms) were not difficult per se, but had to be solved "correctly enough" within the given 75-minutes - much less if you also want to get a good score and ranking.
It does not really matter if your code or design is elegant as long as it manages to pass all system tests as well as the challenges that other coders might throw at it. The permissible input is also severely restrained so that you do not usually have to worry about validating it.
One thing I noticed is that there were not many Indians among the toppers, while there were quite a few people from Poland. This is quite weird as I have met quite a few good Indian coders. Perhaps the lack of awareness, the lack of an enthusiasm for such competitions, the lack of decent net connections, the weird timings of the matches when converted to IST, etc. play a role. If you are an Indian coder reading this, please do consider taking part in these matches and letting your friends know about it.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-02-16
this.ego( ).puncture( )
Intrigued by Sunitha's comments, I checked out a couple of problems in one of the practice rooms in TopCoder. I performed abyssmally - I only got 179 points on a 250 points problem, 242 on a 500 points problem and couldn't even finish a 1000 points problem!
The problems were not difficult per se, but 8 years of "enterprise" software development have blunted whatever little ability I used to have to solve such problems. On the two problems that I did manage to finish, I was stuck for a while with my mind drawing a complete blank on how to solve them - just jammed. Only after a while did my mind clear up a bit and I could code the solutions, but by then I had lost precious time that cost me points.
On the other hand, these are the sort of problems that someone who has absorbed R. G. Dromey's excellent book "How to Solve It by Computer" will find easy to approach and solve well in time. That book seems utterly underrated, as does the classic problem-solving book that was its inspiration, "How to Solve It" by G. Polya. The problems also had guaranteed "good" inputs, so that one does not have to worry about input validation or boundary conditions.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
The problems were not difficult per se, but 8 years of "enterprise" software development have blunted whatever little ability I used to have to solve such problems. On the two problems that I did manage to finish, I was stuck for a while with my mind drawing a complete blank on how to solve them - just jammed. Only after a while did my mind clear up a bit and I could code the solutions, but by then I had lost precious time that cost me points.
On the other hand, these are the sort of problems that someone who has absorbed R. G. Dromey's excellent book "How to Solve It by Computer" will find easy to approach and solve well in time. That book seems utterly underrated, as does the classic problem-solving book that was its inspiration, "How to Solve It" by G. Polya. The problems also had guaranteed "good" inputs, so that one does not have to worry about input validation or boundary conditions.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
2005-02-10
Google India Code Jam (GICJ) 2005
The newspaper advertisement yesterday announcing the Google India Code Jam for 2005 has created quite a stir here. Notwithstanding the bragging rights associated with winning a coding competition open to the whole of South Asia, it offers a total of 16,00,000 rupees in prize money to the top 50 coders and a chance of an offer of employment from Google.
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
(Originally posted on Advogato.)
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