Cleverest coder?
I came across a post on the Guardian’s tech blog called Are You Europe’s Cleverest Coder?. Google and TopCoder are running a competition in Europe for the first time. It sounds like a laugh and with a top prize of €2,500, it’s definitely worth having a go, but unfortunately I’m away during the qualifying rounds.
One thing that does bother though is the label ‘Cleverest coder’. To be fair it is the Guardian’s title, and isn’t used by the competition. Why do I have a problem with it? Well the score is based soley on time. Okay, that’s not strictly true, your program has to pass the tests first, otherwise you get 0, but the discriminator is the time you took, i.e.:
Total points awarded =Where PT is the time spent coding a problem, TT is the total time allocated for coding all problems, and MP is the maximum points available for that problem.
In my experience, the program that was written the quickest is rarely the best, hence I wouldn’t label the winner of this contest the cleverest coder. But I’ll have to take a look at the actual competition before I criticise it too much.
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:45 am
Hmm. Tempting. What’s a bit irritating is that they have restricted the competition to three languages: C++, C# and Java. I don’t know C# and I don’t like Java much so that leaves me with C++, which I haven’t done much of either. Perhaps I’ll have to use Java after all, assuming I enter of course.
Probably best to only admit that you have entered if you get beyond the qualifying rounds to save face. After all, the competition is organised by TopCoder, not CrapCoder.