About 100 coders descended down on Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California for the third edition of Google Code Jam, an international coding competition.
Polish university student Marek Cygan has won the third edition of Google Code Jam.
The winner got a trophy made out of lego and $10,000. Google and Lego go way back. The founders use the toy building blocks for their very first server and even today they still have a fondness for bright colors.
Dutch student Erik-Jan Krijgsman finished second, followed by Petr Mitrichev from Moscow’s State University.
The Pole beat 99 fellow programmers from 32 countries to the first prize of $10,000. The contestants had been selected from a group of 14,500 hopefuls from around the world that entered the Code Jam through the internet.
The programmers had 75 minutes to create a solution for three problems, followed by a ten minute final round. Contestants were allowed to use the Java, C++, C# or VB.NET programming languages.
Previous editions had contestants create an application that calculated the shortest route through a maze. Another problem had contestants create an application that would determine the largest group of people that know each other inside a social network. Yet another provided the coder with the weight of several children and asked them to create an application that would spread them on a seesaw so the device would be in balance.
The tasks are not picked randomly, but rather have a link to problems that Google itself is facing today with their applications.
The competition helps the search engine identify programmers that are good at solving such problems and thereby acts as a recruiting tool. About one third of the 100 finalists also had a job interview scheduled.
Things like finding the fastest way out of a maze is not that different from computing directions in Google maps, Google vice president of engineering Jeff Huber told vnunet.com. Huber stressed however that winning the competition did not guarantee job and that the search engine still followed its regular recruiting procedures.
This is a nice introduction, but not a shortcut, said Huber.
Contestants Set Up Their Computers
All contestants had to work on a PC running Windows XP. Internet connections were available but they were only allowed to use code checking tools – no cheating by asking your buddies at home to help out.
During an interview at the event, Google declined to give out details about the tasks because the competition was still ongoing. This year’s tasks were not available at the time in time for this story’s posting.
This year’s competition marked the first time a woman made it to the final round. The competition’s organizers could not say how Stefanie Leitzka from Germany had done. Huber said he hoped that her participation would create a role model for other women to start a career in computer sciences.
We got a ways to go to improving the diversity that we should have in the field and the industry, he acknowledged.
He could not provide a percentage of women software engineers in Google’s workforce, but said that the company is ‘healthy’ relative to the industry.