Mwa ha ha ha ha I'm the mad sports programmer (sp) Hououin Riela! The organization sent my archnemesis "teja[put some numbers here]" to interfere with our operations. However I'll break the convergence to change the worlds control structure. __

To the point gentlemen, in my opinion, topcoder was always one of the best sp sites. The main problem with tc is that we have to use an applet to compete, and you have to install java, configure security options, then configure plugins, ...

They tried to create a web arena, however it was a failure (you can't even practice in that arena, and there are no plugins). Afaik, they are again constructing a new arena (not sure how is the current status).

Some people think that the rating formula in tc is not accurate, there are usually 3 problems, there are no strong pretests and sometimes even reds end up without solving a single problem! and that cause big fluctuations in rating. However, I think that the rating formula is good, and your points will eventually converge to some interval.

Usually tc provides high quality problems (they used to have a legendary admin), however imho the last tco featured very easy problems (sorry misof).

I noticed that now tc is sending emails as reminders, and also hmehta is posting announcements and editorials in cf.

Last week I realized a cf experiment by posting here a trivia/survey. One of the questions was "who is the biggest competitor of cf?", these were the results:

Do you think topcoder is getting great again? how can they improve?

btw, help me improve my english by pointing grammar, syntax, ... errors