TopCoder Single Round Match
Last night I participated in a “code fest” sponsored by my employer. It was great fun and the code fest was powered by TopCoder. This was my first time participating in any sort of coding competition and while I didn’t make the top three, I did place in the top ten. I’m definitely looking forward to the next company sponsored event in February.
For those of you not familiar with TopCoder, they basically provide a Java application/applet called the Competition Arena. Once you login to the arena, you can then register for a Single Round Match (SRM, in TopCoder parlance), but only during the registration window (which appears to be two hours prior to the event). Once the event begins you have 75 minutes to solve problems of increasing difficulty. Each problem set is assigned a certain number of points (usually 250, 500 and 1000). You are judged both on the correctness of your program as well as the time it took you to develop and test it.
