Friday, July 6, 2007

Videogame Generation: Top Score wins....a JOB

On a sunny Saturday in Bangalore, India, a group of engineers and mathematicians, all in their 20's, sit hunched over computers, frantically writing code. Sounds like a ton of fun, right?

It's the Google India Code Jam, a contest to find the most brilliant computer coder in South and Southeast Asia. The fastest programmer wins $7,000 and a chance at a coveted job at one of Google's research and development centers.

14,000 students registered from all over the region and 50 were selected for the finals in Bangalore. The finalists are given the task of creating and testing software for unique web searches and of getting from point A to point B in a city with a minimum number of turns.

The final challenge is to program a war-based board game, a task so complex that only the winner, Ardian Poernomo, a student from Singapore, is able to complete it.

"It's a dog-eat-dog world," says Robert Hughes, president of TopCoder Inc, the testing company that runs the Code Jams. "Wherever the best talent is, Google wants them."

Check out info about the Code Jam and even try a sample problem!
http://www.topcoder.com/pl/?&module=Static&d1=gicj05&d2=overview

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