The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual competitive programming competition and one of the International Science Olympiads for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989 in Pravetz, Bulgaria. It is the second largest science olympiad, after the International Mathematical Olympiad, in terms of number of participating countries. Each country sends a team of up to four students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and guests.
Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.
Monster Jam is a live motorsport event tour operated by Feld Entertainment. The series began in 1992, and is sanctioned under the umbrella of the United States Hot Rod Association. Events are primarily held in North America, with some additional events in other countries. Although individual event formats can vary greatly based on the "intermission" entertainment, the main attraction is always the racing, two-wheel skills competition, and freestyle competitions by monster trucks.
A hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. They are often run using agile software development practices, such as sprint-like design wherein computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, product managers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on engineering projects, such as software engineering.
Google Code Jam was an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google. The competition began in 2003. The competition consists of a set of algorithmic problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time. Competitors may use any programming language and development environment to obtain their solutions. From 2003 to 2007, Google Code Jam was deployed on Topcoder's platform. Since 2008 Google has developed their own dedicated infrastructure for the contest.
Adam D'Angelo is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California.
Petr Mitrichev is a Russian competitive programmer who has won multiple major international competitions. His accomplishments include gold and silver (2001) medals in the IOI, gold medals in the ACM ICPC World Finals as part of the team of Moscow State University and winning Google Code Jam (2006), the Topcoder Open, the Topcoder Collegiate Challenge, Facebook Hacker Cup as well as numerous national and online contests. He has achieved the highest rating ever among the Algorithm competitors of Topcoder and consistently ranks in the top two of the world. He is the second highest rated Algorithm coder on Topcoder ratings as of February 2021. He currently works at Google on the search engine and helps to prepare Code Jam.
Competitive programming or sport programming is a mind sport involving participants trying to program according to provided specifications. The contests are usually held over the Internet or a local network. Contestants are referred to as sport programmers. Competitive programming is recognized and supported by several multinational software and Internet companies, such as Google and Meta.
Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.
HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is an open-source virtual machine based on just-in-time (JIT) compilation that serves as an execution engine for the Hack programming language. By using the principle of JIT compilation, Hack code is first transformed into intermediate HipHop bytecode (HHBC), which is then dynamically translated into x86-64 machine code, optimized, and natively executed. This contrasts with PHP's usual interpreted execution, in which the Zend Engine transforms PHP source code into opcodes that serve as a form of bytecode, and executes the opcodes directly on the Zend Engine's virtual CPU.
Gennady Korotkevich is a Belarusian competitive sport programmer who has won major international competitions since the age of 11, as well as numerous national competitions. His top accomplishments include six consecutive gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics as well as the world championship in the 2013 and 2015 International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. As of October 2023, Gennady is the highest-rated programmer on Codeforces, CodeChef, Topcoder, AtCoder and HackerRank. In January 2022, he achieved a historic rating of 3979 on Codeforces, becoming the first to break the 3900 barrier.
CodeChef is an online educational and competitive programming platform. CodeChef started as an educational initiative in 2009 by Directi, an Indian software company. In 2020, it was purchased by Unacademy.
Topcoder Open (TCO) was an annual design, software development, data science and competitive programming championship organized by Topcoder, and hosted in different venues around US. In the first two years, 2001 and 2002, the tournament was titled TopCoder Invitational.
Codeforces is a website that hosts competitive programming contests. It is maintained by a group of competitive programmers from ITMO University led by Mikhail Mirzayanov. Since 2013, Codeforces claims to surpass Topcoder in terms of active contestants. As of 2019, it has over 600,000 registered users. Codeforces along with other similar websites are used by some sport programmers, like Gennady Korotkevich, Petr Mitrichev, Benjamin Qi and Makoto Soejima, and by other programmers interested in furthering their careers.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.
Makoto Soejima is a Japanese former competitive programmer. He is one of three people to have won both the Google Code Jam and the Facebook Hacker Cup and the only one to have also won a gold medal with a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). In International Science Olympiads, he has won three gold medals and one bronze in the International Mathematical Olympiad as well as two silver medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
Harsha Suryanarayana, popularly known as "humblefool" in the coding community, was an Indian programmer who is often considered to be "India's greatest coder".
Tiancheng Lou is a Chinese businessman who is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Pony.ai, an autonomous vehicle technology company. He is also a competitive programmer whose achievements include winning the Google Code Jam twice in 2008 and 2009, winning the Topcoder Open Marathon in 2015 and being a gold medalist at the 2004 International Olympiad in Informatics, coming third overall. In terms of prize money won in major competitions, Lou is currently the most successful competitive programmer from China.
Andrew He is an American competitive programmer and the winner of the 2021 Facebook Hacker Cup.
Andrey Lopatin is a Russian programmer, one of the main founders of VKontakte social network and Telegram messenger, two times world champion in competitive programming, 2009 Topcoder Open winner, coach of the SPBU competitive programming team since 2006.
