Google Code Jam Registration Opens Today

Bamfarooni writes "Registration for Google Code Jam 2006 opens today. The event consists of 3 online rounds (September 5-6, September 14 and September 19,) in which participants compete to solve three coding problems faster and more accurately than their competitors. If you've got what it takes, and more of it than anyone else, then you can take home up to $10k for your code-fu."

Recruiting

[Heikell]

This is Google's way of recruiting the debuggers to sort out the problems with their programs.

As with most slashdot questions...

[LordEd]

perhaps you should ask google first? Terms and conditions here [topcoder.com]

False Advertisment?

[Awod]

Or at least poorly written. Want a chance at $165,000? Here's how: Google Code Jam 2006. This competition is a chance for you to use your skills and compete against top programmers from all over the world. Thats on the registration page. On the main page it's slightly different, first prize 10k, 2-10 5k and so on until it all adds up to the suggested 165k. True, it all adds up, but if you wanted to enter and were given a link only to the registration page it can be quite misleading.

Re:Have to use their IDE!

[coshx]

All they say is that you cannot use TopCoder plugins or modify the applet, but do not consider it cheating to copy the problem statement into another IDE, do your development there, and copy the code back. In fact, a good handwritten (e.g. you wrote it yourself and did not get it from a TC plugin) regular expression or two should suffice to parse the problem statement into class/method stubs and test cases. You tie running that regular expression to a macro and you're all set.

Re:Fraud..

[Anonymous Coward]

From the instructions page:

*NOTE: All submissions have a maximum of 2 seconds of runtime per test case. This limit is used in harder problems to force submissions to be of a certain complexity. Because of the inherent speed differences between Python and the other offered languages is large, some problems may require extra optimization or not be solvable using the Python language.

Considering Ruby (in my experience, at least) is considerable slower than Python, I can see why they left out Ruby.

Re:Would be nice...

[Doggan]

Here is a link to a previous year's problem [uic.edu] with a C++ solution. An interesting problem.

Python, too

[hauntedspaceship]

This will be the first year that Python will be allowed along side the traditional TopCoder languages (Java, C++, C#, and VB). I think it will be very interesting to see how Python, which more often than not get can get more done with less code and less time, will compare to the heavier languages like C#, C++, and Java. I wonder if Guido [artima.com] working at Google had anything to do with it?

Re:Have to use their IDE!

[SilentStrike]

Here is a list of 10 problems [felix-halim.net] used in the google code jam india. This was found with with google query google code jam 250 [google.com] (250 stands for the point value of the easy problem).

You can practice on similiar problems in the same environment in the topcoder testing arena. Register for topcoder here [topcoder.com]. Referrer rrenaud [topcoder.com].

Re:As with most slashdot questions...

[Morkano]

This would seem to be the relevant passage:

(f) licenses to TopCoder and Google rights to all information submitted during the tournament (including rights to source code and other executables)