Simon and I have had a chat about instating a programming competition amongst Maldivian developers. We are thinking of holding an open competition amongst all types of coders, involved in scripting to firmware development (if there are any of those in this country).
The current intention is to make entrants compete in developing the most optimal solution for a problem (not restricting the tools for developing the solution). It is the type of problem that has to as yet be scoped.
What we would like from you is to leave a comment here indicating your interest, should you like to participate or offer your expertise. Also, we would like feedback from you about what sort of problem you'd like to ponder over.
After-thought: we should use the same hardware and software platform for all test-runs. Thus, I think we should get an idea of what the generally desired platforms are (processor, memory, OS, etc) from all you interested parties. From these reflections we will decide on the most aggregate platform combo.
After-after-thought: as Simon mentioned in one of the comments to this post, Simon, Shiyaz, Sofwath and myself (did I leave anyone out?) did hold a competition of this sort some years back on a smaller scale. The problem then was sorting a million random numbers. The outcome was that, by the official deadline, Simon won by a hairline with his Delphi-based solution. His was sub-.20 seconds, Shiyaz's and mine were sub-.40 seconds and Sofwath's VB-based solution was way over 1 second (all tests being done on two 600 MHz platforms, one with Windows and the other Linux). Shiyaz is the one who's been bugging us (Simon mostly) to get another contest organized.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
I'm Inn, and I am in.
I'm not inn, but i am in.
Please note that it was Shiyaz (http://escape-code.blogspot.com) who first suggested we revive the old competition. Yes, we've held this type of thing on a smaller scale years ago.
I am in.
Where to go from here? We meet up. Details will follow.
Meanwhile all you out there can start thinking about problems that we could compete on. These problems you can post either in here or in your respective blogs (letting us know where you posted them, so that I can put up the necessary links).
Additionally, you can now start indicating which programming tool you'd prefer to use and on what operating system.
My suggestion:
Write a program which will take in a JPG of Dhivehi text and spew out the 'digitized' result the most accurately and in the least period of time.
You might say, that's an application that could potentially earn a lot of money. We can discuss what we do with the winning solutions at Simon's aforementioned meeting (I vote that we GPL all solutions).
I am out
i am in too.
chopey, a bit of advice for you: don't use VB this time! :)
Another possible problem:
Get everyone to write a problem which can be solved in a given period of time (say if the competition's duration is a month, then a month's time). Then he/she develops a solution for his/her problem and delivers them both. Then every programmer will take the problems of all the rest and try to solve them in another period of time.
Does 6.30pm, Sunday - 15 January - sound good for the first meeting? Please RSVP all ye people who'd like to attend. Additionally, keep in mind that this will be a 'coffee' (yes, primary0, yet another coffee) gathering and you will have to bring your own dough.
Does a ministry grant the right to play chess between friends?
u;ve given the time and day, but where do we go for the meetup?
15th January 2006 past gone, I am out, I can only display "Hello World"
Count me in too, but I could not think of an application that would both suite for firmware and software. Since firmware usually runs at very low speed n memory limited devices without much I/O. But sometime back I think there was this competition to develop the fastest application (hardware/software) to brute force DES and find the key.
Post a Comment