Topcoder will also be having their final TCO this year: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201
Google Code Jam and TCO were the two biggest onsite competitive programming event that's not targeted at students.
This is a huge blow to the sport.
Google Code Jam and TCO were the two biggest onsite competitive programming event that's not targeted at students.
This is a huge blow to the sport.
The web portal is awful and barely works. The desktop client looks like it's from the 2000s and also barely works. To my knowledge the system had weird constraints about input size, and instead of reading from stdin like every other serious website they have the weird "write it in a class with this method signature" format.
Personally, the problem quality didn't compare to websites like Atcoder and most Codeforces contests, and i feel like most people (me included) don't enjoy the "hack phase" format. Maybe if i could bring myself to actually compete more often, my mind would change on these things.
Coding problems while taking of edge-cases for later was really fun.
They even implemented it slightly better: instead of having a separate challenge phase, you can “lock” your solution for a particular problem at any time (which means you cannot resubmit it) and then view other people's solutions, and challenge them with custom input.
The thing is, most of the times, ChatGPT gives a wrong answer, so you need to look at the code, understand it, point out the mistakes and have ChatGPT output the corrected code. Sometimes manual correction is required, and sometimes, rewording of the question is required. It won't do everything for you unless you are particularly lucky, you still need to be a competent coder to work with it.
I can't help but reminded of AlphaGo. When Lee Sedol saw the footage of the AI beating the then European champion, he was like 'That's neat, but it would still take a decade of training to get to world champion level'. That was about half a year before he crushingly lost to it. We just underestimate how fast those models can evolve. I know that playing a well-defined game against itself is an ideal setting for RL models, and that language models use very different architectures. Nonetheless, I still think it's reasonable to think that coding competitions may soon go the way of chess,..., where humans stand no chance against the best machines.
Not that that's a reason to cancel them immediately like Google just did (after all, chess is arguably thriving), but that's a different story.
This was, of course, a couple of years before Facebook was even thought of.