[gfd]

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.

[favre49]

To be honest, TCO being discontinued isn't that big a deal IMO. Maybe I'd feel different if I was a top competitor. However as someone middle of the road, competing is an atrocious experience.

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.

[sltkr]

Thankfully CodeForces is still going strong: https://www.codeforces.com/

[mFixman]

It's a pity that nobody was able to reproduce the challenge phases of TopCoder SRMs.

Coding problems while taking of edge-cases for later was really fun.

[sltkr]

FYI, CodeForces allows challenges too.

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.

[dilyevsky]

Wow topcoder too? What a shame. End of an era

[balaji1]

they don't mention why it's ending?

[c7b]

GPT?

[GuB-42]

We just did a competitive coding event and one of us based his strategy on ChatGPT, which was allowed. That got him through the qualification rounds, but then ended in the middle of the pack, which I think matched his skills as a non-ChatGPT coder. So, not a significant advantage, and none of the top performers used ChatGPT.

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.

[c7b]

Yeah, but with the breakneck speed at which this field is moving, how long will it be before we have dedicated 'Coding Competition' models (if they don't exist already somewhere)?

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.

[sacnoradhq]

https://tco23.topcoder.com

[arynda]

I miss Topcoder. Funny story I went back through all my old SRMs and found one where I was placed in the same room with none other than mzuckerberg. He even unsuccessfully challenged my code and I in turn challenged his with a test he hadn’t considered, and he lost all his points!

This was, of course, a couple of years before Facebook was even thought of.