Competitive programming

Competitive programming is a mind sport usually held over the Internet or a local network, involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications. Contestants are referred to as sport programmers. Competitive programming is recognized and supported by several multinational software and Internet companies, such as Google, and Facebook. There are several organizations who host programming competitions on a regular basis.

A programming competition generally involves the host presenting a set of logical or mathematical problems to the contestants (who can vary in number from tens to several thousands), and contestants are required to write computer programs capable of solving each problem. Judging is based mostly upon number of problems solved and time spent for writing successful solutions, but may also include other factors (quality of output produced, execution time, program size, etc.)

One of the oldest contests known is ACM-ICPC which originated in the 1970s, and has grown to include 88 countries in its 2011 edition. Interest in competitive programming has grown extensively since 2000, and is strongly connected to the growth of the Internet, which facilitates holding international contests online, eliminating geographical problems.

The aim of competitive programming is to write source code of computer programs which are able to solve given problems. A vast majority of problems appearing in programming contests are mathematical or logical in nature. Typical such tasks belong to one of the following categories: combinatorics, number theory, graph theory, geometry, string analysis and data structures. Problems related to artificial intelligence are also popular in certain competitions.

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