Programming Championships and more

Talking about conferences, forums, congresses and LAN parties, you can not deprive hacker and programmer championships. But there are a lot of them, they pay good money for prizes, and in general participation in such events is a very useful experience.

ACM ICPC

When:
Registration of teams ends in September
Quarter-finals take place in October
Semifinals in November
Finals in January — March
Where:
Each year the finals take place in different countries
Website:
cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc

Our list is opened by the International Student Programming Contest (in English the acronym ACM / ICPC or simply ICPC is accepted) - the largest student team programming olympiad in the world. We have already written about this event more than once, but let us repeat ourselves. The history of the contest is rooted in the distant 70s. All over the world this contest is considered quite
prestigious, because, in fact, this championship is held among the young programming elite. Large companies every year closely monitor the ACM ICPC, looking after future personnel, because one of the main resources of the IT industry is brains.

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

Russia for the first time received the right to organize a semi-final Northeast European group in the 1996-1997 season, and since then the teams of our universities have repeatedly won prizes in the championship. The rules of the championship 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 twice participated in the final stage of the Olympiad, or
five times participated 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 from eight to twelve tasks. Note that from the level of complexity of these tasks any programmer of the middle hand will simply boil the brain :).
The winner is the team that will solve the largest number of problems, spending the least time on it. Participants write solutions in C, C ++ or Java and send them to the testing server. Exactly which tests are spinning there, the participants do not know, and the task is not enough to just solve correctly - you still have to meet certain restrictions on time, memory, etc. Each unsuccessful attempt to solve is plus twenty minutes to the team’s penalty time (which is initially equal to zero), so trying and trying to win will not work.

ICPC Final
With monetary rewards in the championship, the situation is as follows: the winning team of the ICPC receives $ 12,000. Teams that receive gold medals receive $ 6,000. Teams that receive silver medals receive $ 3,000. Teams that receive bronze receive $ 1. 500. By the way, this year, IBM spokesman Mark Gwaine said: "The winning team of the ICPC will receive $ 12,000 in prize money from the tournament sponsor, IBM, and all team members who won gold will be offered jobs in the company." So, money is not even the main thing here.

Facebook Hacker Cup

When:
Presumably December-January
Where:
Online
Website:
facebook.com/hackercup

This year, one of the largest social networks on the planet (Facebook) announced the launch of an annual algorithmic programming contest 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 takes place online. The essence of the competition is this: the competition is divided into three stages. The first is the qualification round, which lasted from January 7, 2011 (at 0:00 UTC) to January 10, 2011 (at 0:00 UTC). The 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 completed the task were admitted to the first online round, which took place on January 15-16 (3 sub-rounds of 3 hours at different times of the day). From each sub-round, 1000 of the best participants were selected.
The second and final online round was held on January 22 (from 15:00 to 18:00 UTC). During the finals, 300 of the best hackers (who received the official Hacker Cup T-shirt) and 25 of the best were identified. The winners of the top 25 can count on prizes more serious than souvenir shirts: Facebook pays $ 5000 for first place, $ 2000 for second, $ 1000 for third and comforting $ 100 for places from 4th to 25th. Amounts, of course, are not sky-high, but in the future they are likely to increase, and the money comes with free tickets to California and free accommodation on the Facebook campus in Palo Alto. By the way,
the first Facebook Hacker Cup was won by Russian Petr Mitrichev, a regular in such competitions.
25 best - finalists of Facebook Hacker Cup 2011

Top coder

When:
September 25-28, 2011
Where:
Online and in various US cities. The 2011 Top Coder Final was held in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Website:
topcoder.com
community.topcoder.com/tco11/

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

But back to Top Coder Open (formerly Top Coder Invitational). This is an annual individual professional programming tournament, which is secretly considered to be something like a world championship among the pros. And, in general, it is deservedly considered - this is really one of the largest events of this kind, at which the strongest gather, although anyone who is over 18 years old can try their hand.
The Top Coder community totals nearly 300,000 people.

The competition has been held according to 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 pool of Top Coder Open 2011 is $ 150,000 and 100 trips to Fort Lauderdale (depending on the category of competitions - either to participate in the finals, or simply as an observer). The most popular of the competitions is Algorithm, the prize for 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 abandoned this undertaking.

We advise you to visit the official website of the company and the tournament, where you can get acquainted with 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. In-person final, in 2011, held at the Google office in Tokyo
Website:
code.google.com/codejam

Another popular, respected and rather old tournament is Google Code Jam. As you might guess, Google holds this competition, 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 at Google. Yes, yes, it has already been said above that the basis and main resource of the IT business are brains, so there is 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 competitions, participants in the Google Code Jam can use any programming language and development environment as they wish to solve problems. To take part in the tournament, you need to have a Google account,

The prize situation at Google resembles the Facebook Hacker Cup: first place - $ 10,000, second place - 2000, third place - $ 1000. Seats 4 through 25 are paid for with a symbolic prize of $ 100.

Google AI Challenge

Where:
Online
Website:
http://aichallenge.org/

The University of Waterloo with the support of Google invites everyone who wants to (and can) to take part in a rather unusual contest. Cooperating, they organized real wars of robots. The competition was based on the Galcon game, a real-time strategy game. 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 growth per turn. Planets can be either neutral or belonging to one of two rivals. The number of troops on neutral planets is not increasing. There are still ships (on planets or in flight) from which the fleet is formed. The goal, as you already guessed, is to capture planets and dominate the map. The bot for the game can be written in most of the languages ​​popular today - C #, Java, Python, C ++, Scala, PHP, Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, CoffeeScript and so on. To do this, you only need the appropriate “starter kit”, which you can download from the project website.

Over 4600 bots from people from 112 countries of the world have already taken part in the game. Although the first Google AI Challenge has already taken place, and its results are posted on the site, the organizers still have not decided what to do with the prizes, or rather, whether there will be any at all. The official FAQ evasively reads: “Maybe. We are working on it. ” However, money is not always the main thing; taking part in competitions of this kind is possible and necessary simply “out of love for art” :).
Tournament PlanetWars, held as part of the Google AI Challenge The

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

Codecup

When:
September to January
Where:
Online
Website:
codecup.nl

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

ICFPC

When:
End of June
Where:
Online
Website:
icfpcontest.org

Competition with a long and rich history. 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 coincide with ICFP (international conference on functional programming) - every year a major institute is taken to organize the competition, and the event is always distinguished
unusual and interesting tasks. For example, in past years, participants already had to deal with such problems as the need to adapt an alien with his ship to life on Earth, control satellites in low Earth orbit with the return of 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 (the decisions received during the first 24 hours are evaluated) and main round (all sent decisions are evaluated). The solution can be written in any language (winners of previous years wrote in Haskell, Objective Caml, C ++, Cilk and Java), the main thing is that there should be no problems with running it on a test machine. The prizes at the ICFPC are quite modest, as this money is primarily designed to help winners attend the conference itself,

Intel's AppUp Developer Challenge

When:
Accepting applications for a new stage started on February 21
Where:
Online
Website:
software.intel.com/ru-ru/articles/iadp-challenge-3

AppUp Developer Challenge is an international competition for software developers focused on the promotion of promising applications that can change the user experience of working with netbooks and tablets based on Intel Atom processors. Last year 350 applications from all over the world participated in the competition, and our compatriots were among the winners: the "audience prize" and a prize of $ 60 thousand were received by Russian developers from Samara, Artem Sherstobitov, Ilya Grachev and Nikolai Cholakov with the game Alchemy Classic. Distinguished and Dmitry Ryzhkov, who won second place in the nomination Home Innovation Project with the game AR Home. His prize was
$ 8 thousand.

The rules of the competition, in general, are simple: you need to submit an application to the jury for the competition that relates to one of the following categories. “The best communication application”, “The best media application”, “The best information application”, “The best application for synchronization”, “The best game application”, “The best special application for France”. In addition, the applications participate in the “Grand Prix” in four additional categories: “Best Application for Various Platforms”, “Most Elegant MeeGo Application”, “Best Application for Tablet / Netbook” and “Award to the Most Valuable Developer”. You can win here not only money, but also crazy 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:

Pascal challenge

When:
Annually
Website:
pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/
This is an annual computer vision competition.

IPSC 2011 Champions

When:
Annually
Website:
ipsc.ksp.sk
Annual informal tournament. Team participation, there are many tasks, but the task verification scheme is similar to the CodeJam one, i.e. the participant must pass the test and must send an answer to it. Accordingly, there are no language restrictions. One of the most “fun” contests.

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

When: The
online tour will take place on October 2.
A full-time tour will be held from November 4 to 7, 2011.
Website:
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.