Coding competitions are a great way to explore the possibilities of Google Cloud Platform. The following coding competitions have been developed by Google and third parties, and are hosted on other platforms. There may be prizes, but no purchase is necessary to enter or win.
We’re excited to announce our Code Jam to I/O for Women contest, taking place throughout the month of April! This online coding competition will be held on the Code Jam platform.
Code Jam to I/O for Women is a special contest that allows women around the world to compete in Code Jam while earning chances to attend Google I/O 2017.
We’re also excited to offer this contest in two languages: C++ and Java. You can choose your language of choice when you create your account on the Code Jam platform.
Qualified participants will receive free travel and accommodations to attend Google I/O at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, USA on May 17-19, 2017.
The preliminary round will run from 12:00 AM UTC April 3 through 11:59 PM UTC April 30, 2017. Contestants will be challenged with algorithmic puzzles designed by our team of problem writers.
Google runs a lot of contests, but the Google Code Jam is our favorite. It’s an annual algorithmic programming competition where the best coders in the world compete for fame and glory, as well as prizes like trips around the world. But even if you don’t win, we’ve found that participating is a good way to improve your coding skills and learn new programming languages.
This year, Google is sponsoring Code Jam again, and they’ve introduced a few changes to make things more interesting. The biggest is that there are three qualification rounds instead of one this time. That means there’s more opportunity for everyone to get in on the action!
There are also two new divisions: Distributed and Onsite—the latter being an invitation-only event at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Google has been nice enough to give us a few promo codes for discounted registration (it usually costs $50). So if you’re interested in competing, use either the coupon code “CJ_GOOGLE” or “CJ_HACKER” when registering for your preferred qualification round before March 31st to receive $10 off your registration fee.
Google Code Jam is a programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest lasts up to three hours, with multiple online rounds leading up to an onsite final round at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
I was one of the finalists who flew out to Google HQ and competed for the top three spots, each worth $10,000. The winner was David Stolp from the Netherlands, who won the competition by solving all 15 problems within the three-hour window. He took home $10,000 USD and a trip to next year’s Code Jam finals.
In a recent coding competition, Google asked contestants to write software that would accurately predict the next word in a sentence. A team of researchers from the company’s artificial-intelligence subsidiary DeepMind won with an algorithm that can anticipate contextual words as well as humans do.
The winning team’s algorithm, which works by analyzing a text corpus containing thousands of books, represented each word in the data set as a point in 300-dimensional space. By calculating the distance between any two points, the system could predict how likely it was that one word would follow another.
DeepMind’s success at anticipating the next word in a sentence was especially impressive because it used no information about parts of speech or sentence structure. The system simply assumed that words that are closer together in 300-dimensional space are more likely to be used together than words that are farther apart.
In contrast, most current language prediction systems rely on statistical models that analyze large amounts of data for specific patterns and associations. These systems can learn to recognize certain types of relationships between words. For example, if you type “It was a” into your iPhone keyboard, it will suggest “great night” or “good day.” Other systems can handle slightly more complex patterns—perhaps suggesting “great night out” after “It was a
The goal of the competition was to write a program that can solve a complicated puzzle, in less than one minute. The winning entry does so in 0.2 seconds.
I had never heard of most of the teams before. But some were impressive—including one consisting entirely of high school students, and another consisting of three students who had founded their own software company while still in college.
The best programmers I know seem to be able to do this kind of mental translation effortlessly. Depending on their mood or the situation they may switch back and forth between languages every few minutes. And they don’t just do it once, mechanically translating the code; they seem to actually think in whatever language they’ve switched to. They’ll be talking with you about something else entirely, but if you ask them a question about the code they’re writing, they’ll answer using terminology from the other language, without even stopping to think about it.
A few months ago I was working on a project with someone like this—he’d ask me a question about our shared code, and I’d give him an answer that made sense in English, but he would have no idea what I was talking about. Then he’d rephrase my answer using different words—words that corresponded more directly to