“While visiting the planet Theta VIII, your team of space explorers is forced to participate in the plot of a badly-written book, which takes place in a hotel/casino called the Google Royale. In order to escape the Royale, you will have to make enough money from gambling that you can buy the hotel for V dollars and leave.”Since 2003, Google has been hosting Code Jam, Google’s annual algorithmic coding competition. This event brings together programmers from all over the world to solve the toughest problems we can think up—like the planet Theta VIII scenario above—with the added pressure of the clock ticking down in the background. Contestants competed in the programming language of their choice, using more than 60 different languages (though we aren't sure we'd recommend all of them, like Shakespeare and whitespace, for general use). This year the competition was fierce, with over 30,000 registrants representing a record-breaking 130 countries from around the globe.The Google engineers behind Code Jam teamed up to create a set of difficult problems, with diverse sets covering many different areas of mathematics and computer science, like combinatorics, simulation, theory of computation, dynamic programming, game theory and probability.The competition started with a qualification round in early May, followed by three online rounds. The 25 top finishers from the final online round were then invited to face off in person at the finals in Tokyo on July 29. The finalists represented nine countries, and included our past champions from 2008-2010: Russia's Egor (2010), and China's ACRush (2008 and 2009). Each contestant arrived hoping to earn the title of Code Jam Champion and walk away with the first place prize of $10,000.The room fell silent when the finals began, except for the sound of fingers pounding the keys of 25 keyboards. As the competition unfolded, all eyes were on the online scoreboard as problems were attacked—some solved, others not. Pashka from Russia was the first on the scoreboard, with a solution to a problem called A-small after only 25 minutes. The tension continued to build, with the leaderboard changing constantly as time went by. One minute, China's g201513 was the frontrunner; but then Poland's meret stole the lead. The competition was heating up. The sound of fingers typing seemed to be even faster now. A few of the finalists took turns pacing the room collecting their thoughts.After four hours, the competition was over; we had a new winner, and the title of Code Jam Champion went to Japan’s own rng..58.
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This year's Code Jam Top 25 Finalists gathered at the Google office in Japan for a thrilling code competition.
Posted by the Industry Outreach Team
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