Briefly

I am preparing corporate training in form of bots challenge. Currently I need to test it with real people — so I am seeking for about 20 volunteers. To bring some motivation I propose the small prize of $100 for winner.

To participate you should have basic skills in javascript (you can learn it sufficiently in an hour if you are using C++ or Java usually).

Here is project page — you can download game files and tool for challenging bots locally. You also can register an account here (see notes below).

More info

As I told, it is somewhat resembling contest or challenge of small programs written in javascript — we call them Bots. Bots should play the game against each other. Game is as follows:

Two players throw the single die (cube with numbers 1..6 upon its sides). Each could throw die as many times as he want unless 6 is cast. If player stops at his will and passes turn to opponent, all points cast in this turn are added to his score. If 6 was cast, turn is passed to opponent and nothing is scored to player for this turn. One who scores 100 or more wins. More details on rules you can find in help at the project page.

Currently I suppose to select the winner according to final rating with some lottery-like process provided that participants with higher rating have more chances to be selected (e.g. if player A has rating 400 points more than player B, his chances are 10 times more). This process is described too, though it could be discussed and changed (before final stage starts).

I plan that final stage will be held on Nov 24 2012, though date could be shifted earlier or later for participants comfort — it could be discussed too.

Registration

You can register account at the project web page. Or you can write me your e-mail and I'll create for you an upgraded account. If you registered account already you could also "request an upgrade" on profile page. Non-upgraded accounts are not used when selecting winner, so you can register additional accounts for testing purposes. It would be good if your main account have the same name as one at codeforces.

Testing

Please write me about any bugs (malfunctions) or holes (potential security vulnerability) you find. We suppose that if some problem is found that could not be fixed at all and prevent our little test-contest from being finished, prize will be awarded to one who found this problem.

Feel free to ask any questions here or privately.

For ones who are not still aware of the currently running specific context by yandex.

http://switchdetect.yandex.ru/en/

What is it? I've tried to participate year ago in similar contest. It resembles TopCoder Marathon, but with 17-gigabytes text file of input data. I was bewildered and annoyed since one pass of tests on the full dataset took several hours on my netbook. And however I am not smart enough in math, I think. Though I believe there are people who may find this contest quite interesting.

Registration is opened till December 15 2012, money prizes assumed.

Friends, Colleagues and Comrades!

Today we found that wikipedia lacks an article on Competitive Programming - our beloved branch of sports and engineering.

We are to fix it.

I wrote very short stub page here. But my English is poor and my knowledge of Competitive Programming facts and history is not great. Also I do not know wikipedia rules very well (though I like this resource, as many of you).

Please help to improve it. You may edit an article itself, or write to me useful links on the subject or proposition on what to add/improve here.

UPD: Thanks to unknown colleagues who significantly improved existing four paragraphs. Now I want to add another two: sample of the problem statement and list of some most notable contestants.

For first I need the allowance of someone of the authors to post some nice, easy to understand and, possibly, funny problem. For second I need some links to personal pages of notable sport programmers (not only Petr and tourist), may be links to ones already mentioned on dedicated wikipedia pages.