Results of 2010 TopCoder Open
The main tournament of the year at TopCoder ( Habraanons ) ended a week ago, and at Habré this important event has not yet been covered! This is strange and surprising, and I, a loyal adherent of TopCoder, hasten to correct this misunderstanding - especially since this year I had the opportunity to watch the finals live.
The most spectacular and emotionally intense competition of the tournament this year did not deceive the expectations of the audience. Multiple champion of the past years, Petr Mitrichev ( Petr ) surprised and slightly shocked his fans, dropping out of the competition in the first semi-final with only one solved problem. The second favorite, TianCheng Lou (better known as ACRush ), confidently won his semi-final and led the entire final to the most system tests that his third task could not stand, dropping him into second place under a solid "aah" of viewers.
The champion was Makoto Soejima ( rng_58 ), the third favorite.
Third place was unexpectedly taken by Anton Mellit (Klinck), Ukraine.
More detailed results of the Algorithm Competition are reviewed on SnarkNews and on the official blog of TCO'10 (with a step-by-step reporting from the Arena).
The final round of marathons lasted 24 hours. Until the very end, I did not believe that the participants would stand it (I myself endured a ten-hour time difference with Kiev), but the more optimistic observers were right - only one of the participants left the arena. The task turned out to be not entirely successful - too unpredictable behavior of earthquakes left too little room for improving the solution algorithm, and the final results depended rather strongly on the specific set of tests on which the solutions were compared. The champion was Yoichi Iwata ( wata ), who this year was twice a finalist - in the Marathons and in the Algorithm.
Marathon Competition rounds discussed in more detail on the official blog. There were no Russians or Ukrainians in this final, apparently, which is why SnarkNews limited himself to a list of participants .
An unusual type of competition in which participants must correct errors and make improvements to existing software. It differs in that it requires both speed of action (in the finals, one task was given only 10 minutes) and knowledge of a rather wide range of technologies. The peculiarity of scoring for the three final rounds was that only the first one who completed it correctly received points for the task; the following correct accomplishments of the same task did not bring points to their authors, but took them away from the leader. Be faster than anyone just had :-)
The results of this competition all Ukrainians crammed patriotic pride, and all, without exception - gender delight: champion (by a wide margin from second place) was a Ukrainian Skripachova Margarita ( Margarita)! Girls who successfully perform at TopCoder are generally extremely rare, and TCO Champion, in my opinion, is Margarita the first :-)
The results of other competitions for an outside observer are not so interesting. I will note only a few things:
Of the ten finalists of Studio Competition (graphic design), four are girls :-)
Of the 15 finalists of Design Competition (software design), four are Ukrainians and one Russian, but only three are Chinese.
And in the Development Competition (software development) of the same 15 finalists, 9 Chinese and only one Ukrainian.
Notes on the finals are not complete without a few words about the sponsors of the tournament - NSA, Facebook, PayPal and Yandex. For many finalists, one of the reasons for striving in Las Vegas was the opportunity to interview in one of the companies of their dreams - and since the people present at the finals are already outstanding by themselves, the interviewing process was greatly simplified for them. For those who were not interested, there was always the opportunity to simply pull off a gift or two :-) And since T-shirts were and remain a favorite type of gifts, at the end of the tournament you could see the side-by-side finalists in T-shirts from Facebook and VKontakte (homework ;-)) or from Yandex and Google (won a couple of months earlier in GCJ'10). However, no holivars were noticed - the atmosphere of the tournament was too friendly.
Stories about TCO'10, photos from the finals, comics on the topic and the program of what was happening can be studied in the tournament blog .
Algorithm
The most spectacular and emotionally intense competition of the tournament this year did not deceive the expectations of the audience. Multiple champion of the past years, Petr Mitrichev ( Petr ) surprised and slightly shocked his fans, dropping out of the competition in the first semi-final with only one solved problem. The second favorite, TianCheng Lou (better known as ACRush ), confidently won his semi-final and led the entire final to the most system tests that his third task could not stand, dropping him into second place under a solid "aah" of viewers.
The champion was Makoto Soejima ( rng_58 ), the third favorite.
Third place was unexpectedly taken by Anton Mellit (Klinck), Ukraine.
More detailed results of the Algorithm Competition are reviewed on SnarkNews and on the official blog of TCO'10 (with a step-by-step reporting from the Arena).
Marathon
The final round of marathons lasted 24 hours. Until the very end, I did not believe that the participants would stand it (I myself endured a ten-hour time difference with Kiev), but the more optimistic observers were right - only one of the participants left the arena. The task turned out to be not entirely successful - too unpredictable behavior of earthquakes left too little room for improving the solution algorithm, and the final results depended rather strongly on the specific set of tests on which the solutions were compared. The champion was Yoichi Iwata ( wata ), who this year was twice a finalist - in the Marathons and in the Algorithm.
Marathon Competition rounds discussed in more detail on the official blog. There were no Russians or Ukrainians in this final, apparently, which is why SnarkNews limited himself to a list of participants .
Mod dash
An unusual type of competition in which participants must correct errors and make improvements to existing software. It differs in that it requires both speed of action (in the finals, one task was given only 10 minutes) and knowledge of a rather wide range of technologies. The peculiarity of scoring for the three final rounds was that only the first one who completed it correctly received points for the task; the following correct accomplishments of the same task did not bring points to their authors, but took them away from the leader. Be faster than anyone just had :-)
The results of this competition all Ukrainians crammed patriotic pride, and all, without exception - gender delight: champion (by a wide margin from second place) was a Ukrainian Skripachova Margarita ( Margarita)! Girls who successfully perform at TopCoder are generally extremely rare, and TCO Champion, in my opinion, is Margarita the first :-)
Other competitions, sponsors and more
The results of other competitions for an outside observer are not so interesting. I will note only a few things:
Of the ten finalists of Studio Competition (graphic design), four are girls :-)
Of the 15 finalists of Design Competition (software design), four are Ukrainians and one Russian, but only three are Chinese.
And in the Development Competition (software development) of the same 15 finalists, 9 Chinese and only one Ukrainian.
Notes on the finals are not complete without a few words about the sponsors of the tournament - NSA, Facebook, PayPal and Yandex. For many finalists, one of the reasons for striving in Las Vegas was the opportunity to interview in one of the companies of their dreams - and since the people present at the finals are already outstanding by themselves, the interviewing process was greatly simplified for them. For those who were not interested, there was always the opportunity to simply pull off a gift or two :-) And since T-shirts were and remain a favorite type of gifts, at the end of the tournament you could see the side-by-side finalists in T-shirts from Facebook and VKontakte (homework ;-)) or from Yandex and Google (won a couple of months earlier in GCJ'10). However, no holivars were noticed - the atmosphere of the tournament was too friendly.
Stories about TCO'10, photos from the finals, comics on the topic and the program of what was happening can be studied in the tournament blog .
