Programming Challenges

Today, I had a chat with ali on different online programming challenges as IOPC is going on write now and ali has taken part in it. I was remembering my glorious days when I won a jacket in bitwise.

I am just going to enlist a few programming challenges. Obviously, the list is not exhaustive.

1) ACM ICPC : I believe it is one of the most prestigious programming challenges. It is an IBM sponsored annual event.

2) Top Coder : This too is one of the most prestigious programming challenges. General belief is that the emphasis is more on programming rather than algorithms.

3) IOCCC : Well, here one can find the weirdest C programs. Most of the time it will seem that the winning entry programs won't even compile. However, they do but it is difficult ( rather next to impossible ) to find out what they would do by merely reading the code. My favorite program is here. And yeah, it DOES compile and run.

4) Bitwise : One of the most prestigious INDIAN programming challenges. I used the word "Indian" because it is held by Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The challenge however is open internationally. It is really a pity to see that since the inception of the event, only once an Indian team could grab the first prize. Ameya Karkare ( aka crack-kare ) and Navneet Lohiwal ( aka lollu ) from Indian Institute of technology Bombay (my alma-matter :-) ) played with handle "AK47", undoubtedly shooting down all competing teams.

5) OPC : Held annually by Chennai Mathematical Institute. One of the toughest programming challenge I have ever faced.

6) CodeCraft : Held annually by International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad as part of their technology festival Felicity.

7) IOPC : Hosted by IIT Kanpur as part of its technology festival techkriti.

Pune Innovation 2008 : Ideas in Practice

Website: http://www.innovations-pune.com/
Government : www.dsir.gov.in [Click TePP]

1. Do the innovation. It should be unique. It can be simple and obvious too. Think Beyond Imagination.
2. Find out a pricing model / revenue model. Strategy/People.
3. Do the market analysis. Compare with other products. Pros/Cons of your and others products.
4. What are the pin points of your product?
5. Take care of customers and their expectations. Think as if you are one of them. User experience.
6. Think not only for early bird advantage but in long terms. Think Fast. Vision.
7. Do the Risks/Liabilities.
8. How do you do marketing? Promote. Om Shanti Om.
9. Always have the exit plan ready. (Just like in sysadgiri where you should always have the backup plan ready.)
10. Blank. (You have to fill this by yourself.)
 
Vaibhav.

ps: What your Dreams really mean!

The Fastest Language

Well,
Though this post is a little digression from what this forum is meant
for. It is really an interesting one because many a times we think

Which language is the fastest?

Considering the same hardware/environments are provided, it will all
depend on how well a compiler/interpreter make use of underlying
hardware/environment to generate native/interpreted code.

In a computer language shootout [Survey]
differrent compiler for different languages tested against their
ability to translate code for Ackermann Function
[Ackermann_function], Fibonacci numbers[Fibonacci_number] and
Tak functions [TAKFunction.html].

I was really happy to see that my favourite compiler gcc rules :-)

-by sbjoshi