LiveCoda, Real-Time Coding Competition 95
Robert Shelton points out this "debrief" from ESCI LiveCoda 2006, a live programming competition. From the article: "On Wednesday the 24th of May at Loop Bar in Melbourne (Australia) fourteen teams of programmers gathered for the first ESCI LiveCoda real-time programming competition. Possibly the first performance based real-time programming competition. Before a packed night club with live music, each team had just ten minutes to write a program which could correct a corrupted image." (Here's a mirror of the LiveCoda site).
I'm sure that this will make the IT trade cooler (Score:5, Funny)
"How long, O Lord?" (Score:4, Insightful)
When are people going to start programming contests where the award is given for something that's actually useful, such as fewest bugs, most readable, best re-use of existing code, etc?
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:3, Interesting)
Kind of like what they did here.
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
You mean like baseball?
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Know what it's called? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:4, Interesting)
Patently false, for a number of human reasons:
1) Programmers are are fast are generally easilly bored. This leads to wandering focus.
2) Programmers who are fast often approach problems in a strange way. This can lead to convoluted and confusing implementations.
3) Programmers who are fast rarely see value in commenting. Why comment when I can rewrite faster than I can reuse?
4) Programmers who are fast are usually impatient, and don't work well with teams. I *like* this competition because it has some focus on teamwork, but I'm generalizing.
For such simple problems as are being solved in this competition most of these problems aren't problems. But all of these things will eventually lead to unstable, unmaintainable codebases. I'd prefer to have someone who is good at code re-use, who is good at seeing the complex parts of problems and who is good at getting the right architecture the first time. None of these things are tested in this competition.
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
The parent poster's name is SpeedBump, and that's exactly what a real programming competition should have: speed bumps, hurdles, obstacles. Here's how I envision it: give the teams a medium difficulty problem to solve. The judges act as clients. The teams have a given period of time
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what people actually believe? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having spent 20 years in the programming profession, I've worked with a lot of programmers. The speedy ones are usually exceptionally smart, but their code is completely unmaintainable, no matter how much time they are given to write it. If you work any time in industry, you'll know that 90% of your life is maintaining or improving upon code that others have written, so the speedy ones actually hurt overall programmer productivity for the team.
I'll take a slow and methodical programm
Re:This is what people actually believe? (Score:3, Insightful)
I know plenty of smart, fast programmers that write clear code and follow the rules. Sometimes th
Meh - TopCoder has had these for a while. (Score:3, Insightful)
But most people prefer competing in the algorithm competition (which are an ho
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
Most jobs depend more on one's ability to meet deadlines.
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
They often exercise a number of different ideals. The most recent one featured code reuse/flexible design as one of the primary goals.
Of course you're almost always going to have some element of coding speed featured in these contests as, well, they don't want to wait a year for the submissions to start rolling in.
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
There's no point to it, the best has already been done [ioccc.org] - I can't find any bugs or anything confusing in the source (somewhat ironic considering that the 'O' in "IOCCC" stands for "Obfuscated").
Well, maybe not re-use of existing code but one could very easily apply the source to any application with minimal impact to a program
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:2)
heh, i focused on quality and speed, but sucked at both
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/ [plt-scheme.org]
According to some of the postings on the mailing list it didn't work too well though.
Re:"How long, O Lord?" (Score:1)
Ten minutes to fix an image? (Score:1)
If this is anything... (Score:2)
The first? (Score:5, Funny)
Geeks? (Score:5, Funny)
From the FAQ (Score:5, Funny)
9) Will I have access to a Dvorak keymap?
Yes.
10) Were you really asked about Dvorak keymaps?
Yes.
--
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Re:From the FAQ (Score:1)
I'd say it's a valid question. Although I'm fluent in both QWERTY and Dvorak and have about 90% of my Dvorak speed in QWERTY for most applications, if you sit me down at VIM with a QWERTY keyboard and tell me to whip up some C++ code, I'm like a retarded monkey. I start out by typing "Z,", and within 5 minutes I'm so confused I start punching myself, crying "WHY DOES MY FACE HURT I DON'T UNDERSTAND NOTHING MAKES SENSE"
Oh the possibilities (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:1)
I have been a programmer for over a decade, a proud geek for 15 years.
With that being said, I have also been a resident DJ here in Columbus, GA for nearly 8 years. There are a LOT of geeks that love the club scene and dance music. Programming to me is a lot like running a live mix-set....take components of varying complexity & origin, then blend them together to create a good program (set). In programming, the desired out
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:1)
Not familiar with those. I usually work best with Eric Johnson and Blues Saraceno. Few, if any, vocals to distract the mind, variation in tempos (kicking adrenaline all the time doesn't work, long-term), fairly complex and somewhat repetitive.
Tried a variety of other stuff. This just happens to be what works
Re:Oh the possibilities (Score:2)
You have GOT to be kidding (Score:2)
A geek flexing his mental muscles is still a geek; girls will still put him in the friend zone.
Re:You have GOT to be kidding (Score:1)
Re:You have GOT to be kidding (Score:1)
Geeks don't have to be socially/relationally undesirable. The problem that many geeks have is they don't get out enough to gain the social intelligence necessary to avoid the occasional faux pas that labels them as "odd" for the remainder of the conversation. I have a few theories on why geeks have a hard time in social situations:
1) Geeks spend a lot of time interacting with people online, which is different fr
Re:You have GOT to be kidding (Score:2)
Re:10 minute lucky programming lottery (Score:2)
I have extensive experience writing image processing code, and from their description of the problem I think I would be able to bust out the basic structure (reading, processing, writing) in under three minutes. That would leave me seven minutes to figure out how to correct the "corruptions" in the image, which, if they are not pixel interdependent (which would involve some kind of filtering), I could easily do in the allotted time.
More importantly, because I have experience, I would probably not write an
Re:10 minute lucky programming lottery (Score:1)
Re:10 minute lucky programming lottery (Score:2)
Personally (Score:4, Funny)
And, if I'm in a nightclub chances are I'm in no fit state to do any coding. Actually, I've had an idea - a coding competition where you have to drink eight beers first!
Re:Personally (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Personally (Score:2)
Re:Personally (Score:2)
Advice: QA has to be drunk too!
Re:Personally (Score:2)
Re:Personally (Score:1)
Did the choice of language affect the results? (Score:1, Interesting)
btw. I mostly use Python for my desktop apps and C or assembler for embedded work.
Re:Did the choice of language affect the results? (Score:4, Insightful)
With this particular competition (which looks to consist of reading in a simple image format, like PPM then applying a couple of simple transformations then writing the new file back out), the code isn't going to be too terribly different between most languages, and therefore the higher expressiveness of something like Python or OCaml wouldn't really get a chance to shine.
Re:Did the choice of language affect the results? (Score:2)
Not the first (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not the first (Score:2)
ACM, ACSL, and others are aplenty, but they all take hours to complete.
Re:Not the first (Score:1)
Ha.... (Score:2, Funny)
"hey bill, what are you doing friday night"
"i'm gonna go out clubbin'....what about you?"
"Ermm....uhmm...i'm gonna go see how fast i can write a program....but it's at a club...."
"Dear lord...you're even more of a geek than i thought you were..."
definitely not first (Score:2)
My best friend back in high school's school was involved in a multi-school real-time programming competition.
12-16 years ago.
Re:definitely not first (Score:2)
I guess they mean "Possibly" in the sense that they're just being pretentious.
Re:definitely not first (Score:1)
I'd be interested in links for this (from a history point of view). History in terms of live coding [wikipedia.org] such as [wikipedia.org].
cheers, rob.
I was there, more info (Score:4, Informative)
Anyhow, it went down like this: four machines with an editor common to all of them, with teams of 2-4 people. They were given a 200x200 image file consisting of simple rgb triples. (200 100 50\n100 133 212 etc, real simple). There was a transform done to it that they had to reverse. The ones I saw were some color rotations/swaps and rotations in increments of 90 degrees. The program had to read in the file, invert the transformation, and output the correct image in the same simple format.
The teams could pick whatever language they wanted. I saw C, C++, Python and Java before I got bored and left. The admins had a system set up that it would compile the code at certain intervals and print out the errors on the screen, or the resulting image if it compiled successfully.
The teams didn't really have trouble writing the code. It was no longer than a screen worth, and they seemed to get that in about 2.5-4 minutes. They spent the rest of the time trying to figure out what the transformation was. They'd try 10-15 different color rotations/swaps combos before the time ran out. They didn't get the correct image in advance, but they were all photos from around the Melbourne area and it was easy to tell what it should be.
If I had heard about it with enough time in advance I would have taken some friends and entered... ah well.
Re:I was there, more info (Score:1)
Re:I was there, more info (Score:2)
Re:I was there, more info (Score:2, Informative)
I had a quick go in awk (solo) after the end of the night and in that language, which is DESIGNED for dealing with columns of text, means you can solve any of the problems presented in a couple of minutes.
It's pretty clear you weren't there for long as your summary is not that close to what happened, though your description of the problem is spot on.
Most solutions
Re:I was there, more info (Score:2)
Live 8bit GameDev Contest in Seattle, WA (Score:2)
I have a place picked out and could organize it, the entry fee would cover the venue and the pot. The rest I'd cover out of pocket unless co-organizers wo
I competed (Score:1)
Fast programming is unimpressive (Score:1)
Quality not quantity is what counts.
How about a programming contest where you get 6 months, and the winner is the program
judged most elegant, applicable, comprehensible, extensible, and all the other ibles.
Oh, and has the cleverest recursive acronymic moniker of course.
Re:Fast programming is unimpressive (Score:1)
The "first" competition? (Score:1)
In what way is this new? There's the ACM ICPC [baylor.edu] for students, TopCoder [topcoder.com], and the Google Code Jam [google.com], which have been around for years!
Am I missing something about this competition?