TopCoder Open is an international individual championship on programming which is carried out since 2001. This year's competition includes six categories: «Algorithms», «Development», «Information architecture», «Marathon», «Designing UI» and «Prototyping». ITMO University assumed responsibility for conducting the first TCO-2015 regional event, in the framework of which round 2A in the "Algorithms" category and hackathon of office oriented applications development took place. According to Lidia Perovskaya, the tutor of the computer technologies department, about 80 programmers gathered in the building of the University on Sunday.
"There is a number of academic championships on programming, but in order to take part in them, you need to go to school or university. Any programmer can participate in the TopCoder, it is a kind of community. Also, there are many organizations that hold their events: Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup, Yandex.Algorithm. These are commercial championships, they are tied to the needs of specific companies, and the TopCoder is a freestanding competitive platform which sets a credible champion. TopCoder stood at the origins of the sports programming competitions and in many ways it sets the standard for such events," Lidia Perovskaya says.
Parallel to conducting qualifying rounds, on the 29 of May a two-day hackathon started with a prize fund of $ 5000 during which programmers were to develop applications for office use, using at least two of the three presented API. 15 teams gathered to take part in the hackathon but only two of them presented on Sunday their finished projects: system of recording and maintaining log files of business meetings and the search system for text documents and images placed in a shared folder.
"We hope that the hackathon participants will continue to develop their ideas; perhaps from the competition projects they'll create some working solutions, which will continue to grow. Programming competitions stages require the participants to come up with their own algorithm and a small amount of data processed. Once the projects become large-scale we have to use classic algorithms already realized in the API. From this perspective, the hackathon tasks and the TopCoder championship qualifying rounds tasks complement each other well," Lidia Perovskaya comments.
The next regional event will be held on June 20 in San Francisco, then there will be programmers meetings in Japan, India, Indonesia, and the final round will take place in the United States. The exact dates of the TCO-2015 intermediate competitions will be published on the official website of the contest closer to the dates of their conduct. It is known that only 12 people will be in the final TopCoder Open; the winner will receive a prize of $ 5,000, and programmers, who take second and third places - prizes of $ 2,000 and $ 1,000, respectively.