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Programming Technology

Favorite Programming Contests? 37

Posted by Cliff from the code-fu-competitions dept.
SandSpider asks: "Sometimes, the daily grind of programming can wear a person down. Sometimes, people need challenges to expand their abilities and outlook. My personal favorite is the ADHOC/MacHack Showcase, where you spend up to 48 hours straight programming something impressive, perhaps with the conference theme, perhaps no. Sure, there's no prize, but it's the recognition from other programmers that makes it worthwhile. What is everyone else's favorite programming competition, and what did you do for it?"
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Favorite Programming Contests? More

Favorite Programming Contests?

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    • This sounds like something my teacher once said to me. "In c there is no programming errors, it's just a different program."

  • By far The daily WTF [thedialywtf.com] (Despite the name it is work safe). I check that every morning, and if I still haven't won I know I'm safe to program today, otherwise I change careers to something that doesn't involve computers.

  • I like my boss' daily contest (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Write some code and you win your job!
  • http://www.thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]

    Ok, so it's not something you are looking forward to winning, or ever knowing you 'won' for that matter.

    We have all made our WTFs but the entries here are real winners :)

  • robocraft looks fun... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i have to admit i have never gone to the trouble(well it may not be trouble) to set it up and try this, but competitions like this seem like theyd push the way i think... sure sems like a nice escape from my typical DB business app...

    http://robocraft.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]

    or

    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-370January--IAP--2005/Course Home/index.htm [mit.edu]

  • The ICFP of course. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Meacham ( 1112 ) on Tuesday June 21, 2005 @05:20PM (#12876109) Homepage
    http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/ [plt-scheme.org]

    No language restrictions, very interesting problems. quite prestigious to win. it is great!

    The only downside is that it is only once a year. It is fun to do it in a language you don't know as a forced crash course too if you don't expect to win. :)

    It starts this weekend! so start preparing.
    • I second that. I've participated about four times before, and it's always a great weekend of fun. There are very little restrictions so almost anyone should be able to participate.
  • Personally, after I've gotten worn out by much programming, the challenging thing I do is that I go on vacation, and not one of those stressful "let's make sure we see 150 different tourist attractions per day" kind. I'm talking the sit down and rest and go swimming in the ocean/lake/hotel's pool kind.

    Works pretty well for me. Coding for 48 hours straight for no money doesn't really sound too relaxing or enticing to me.

  • Perl Golf (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Masa ( 74401 ) on Tuesday June 21, 2005 @05:24PM (#12876142) Journal
    Perl Golf, http://terje.perlgolf.org/ [perlgolf.org], used to be my favourite programming related past time activity couple of years ago, when I programmed with Perl. Even though I haven't programmed with Perl in a log time, I still think that the Perl Golf is one of the coolest contest around.
  • bash.org
    and then i said that the deadline for the oxford coding competition was valentines day, they were like, "do you geeks have weird alternative holidays for every thing?"

  • Corewars! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Tuesday June 21, 2005 @05:28PM (#12876169) Homepage
    A little long in the tooth, but corewars is still fun.
    • http://www.corewars.org/
    • http://www.koth.org/

  • Underhanded C (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Daedala ( 819156 ) on Tuesday June 21, 2005 @05:34PM (#12876206)
    This contest [brainhz.com] has already [brainhz.com] been slashdotted, [slashdot.org] but the idea is sublime: "write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must...do something subtly evil." And the prize is beer!

  • Circuit Cellar (Score:3, Informative)

    by nullset ( 39850 ) on Tuesday June 21, 2005 @05:35PM (#12876211)
    I enter circuit cellar contests whenever I can. The development kits alone are worth the cost of a one year subscription (Linky! [circuitcellar.com] *looks at the 60Mhz ARM board and tries to come up with a project idea* --buddy
    • So if I subscribe, I get hardware too?
      • No, you have to enter contests early enough to be one of the lucky ones to get a free dev kit. I doubt you have to be a subscriber to enter the contests, either. But hell, if you love playing with that stuff, like I do, why not subscribe- it's a great resource and fun read.

        I got a free kit from Renesas for the contest that is about to end. For the upcoming Philips-sponsored design contest for an Arm core(?) mcu, there are no kits, so you have to make your own board.
        • Hmmmmm. Okay. Where would one get dev kits, if one wanted to learn all about embded programming and teh such?
          • I'd recommend a few things for learning embedded.... 1) www.embedded.com - look around :) 2) www.gansslegroup.com - This guy rocks 3) www.circuitcellar.com - subscribe, read, apply for contests :) 4) buy a book.... you might want to look around for info on the 8 bitters that are popular these days, either the Microchip PIC or the Atmel AVR seem to be popular for hobbyists. You can get development kits for either one for less than $50 or so. Might be worth your while to take a college course on embedded i
        • Actually they were giving away boards for the ARM contest. I got one myself. It's a Keil MCB2130 board. --buddy
  • There are a lot of microcontroller/hardware programming contests.

    It is programming on a small scale, but it also involves building some hardware. If you are burnt out on programming, working with your hands on real hardware is a great way to relax. It is also fun to work on the nitty gritty low level stuff if you are used to high-level languages. (or vice versa). When it comes to languages it is Haskell or Assembly for me, anything in between would just be mediocre :)

    There are a lot of PIC, Amtel, or oth
  • ACSL, the American Computer Science League, is an international programming competition for high school students. Despite it's name, it has become an international competition that many students around the world enter. It contains two parts. The first has your team of 3 or 5 people (depending on which division you are in) program 3 or 5 programs as a team that solve given problems. The second part is a written multiple choice test that quizes many basic programming skills from basic data structur

  • ADHOC/MacHack (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jonjohnson ( 568941 )

    I'll second the OP's favorite. I've only attended for two years, but it's a great conference. I'm for sure going again this year.

    I came in second place two years ago in the showcase by teaming up with someone else to write a networked Pong game that literally played across the screens. The paddles were on the end computers, and the ball would bounce across all the computers between it. It hovered over the desktop, which we demonstrated by showing a QuickTime movie playing in the background on one of the c

  • ... can be found online [adhocconference.com] and previous winners can be found at the same site [adhocconference.com].

    My favorite MacHack was the one done by Dean Yu that blasted a random inflammatory sound ("ouch!") for each error spewed while compiling under MPW. Come to think of it, Dean did a whole bunch of my favorite hacks.

    I've gotta think of a good hack to do this year.

    (keeps thinking the same thing year after year)

  • At a university on the west coast once voted as "#1 party school in the nation" by Playboy, and also part of the original ARPA net, we used a VAX on it's last legs as part of a drinking game.

    We called the event "Crash and Compile". It was run as a pretty standard ACM style programming contest, all coding done through terminals on the VAX (running 4.2 BSD IIRC), but with the handicap that an alcoholic beverage had to be consumed before every compile. Who "won" is a matter of debate, but it was fun watching

  • I prefer competitions that involve short problems.

    Top Coder [topcoder.com] is a very large event, with thousands of participants. They have weekly-ish small competitions, and multiple times per year they have cash prizes ranging from $1000 to $100000.

    Sphere Online Judge [sphere.pl] is another great competition, although far smaller and with no real time limit. No prizes, but much more varied and fun problems, with a HUGE selection of programming languages and completely automated judging.
  • Universidad de Valladolid has a large archive of programming problems. The online judge allows C, C++, Java, and Pascal.

    http://acm.uva.es/problemset/ [acm.uva.es]
  • For those who dont know, the ACM programming competition that is held on a world wide scale is the de-facto programming competition for bachelors (other than TopCoder, which is not limited to college students I think, but it is not organized on such a massive scale as ACM)

    http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/ [baylor.edu]
  • PDRoms Coding Competition 3.33 [pdroms.de] is going on right now, check it out if you want. I'm too busy to participate this time, myself.

    The yearly MiniGame Compo [ffd2.com] is great too. I've written 1kB and 4kB games in previous years, they didn't rank too well but they were a lot of fun to write.
  • 7 years ago they were getting ready to rebuild the Baby Manchester Mark I [man.ac.uk] computer, a vintage late-1940s early PC.

    They wrote a simulator, several actually (here's one [demon.co.uk] that's still online)
    , for a 32-word x 32-bit-per-word computer. Each word had 5 address bits and 3 instruction bits, the rest was user-defined. Optionally, you could treat a word as 32 bits of user-defined data. The best program won a prize, everone else got a written certificate of thanks.

    The winning entry? A noodle-timer. Congrats aga

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