Competitive programming
mind sport
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. Competitive programming is recognized and supported by several multinational software and Internet companies, such as Google and Meta.
A programming competition generally involves the host presenting a set of logical or mathematical problems, also known as puzzles or challenges, to the contestants (who can vary in number from tens or even hundreds to several thousand). Contestants are required to write computer programs capable of solving these problems. Judging is based mostly upon number of problems solved and time spent on writing successful solutions, but may also include other factors (quality of output produced, execution time, memory usage, program size, etc.).
History
One of the oldest contests known is the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) which originated in the 1970s and has grown to include 88 countries in its 2011 edition.
From 1990 to 1994, Owen Astrachan, Vivek Khera and David Kotz ran one of the first distributed, internet-based programming contests inspired by the ICPC.
Interest in competitive programming has grown extensively since 2000 to tens of thousands of participants (see Notable competitions), and is strongly connected to the growth of the Internet, which facilitates holding international contests online, eliminating geographical problems.
Overview
The aim of competitive programming is to write computer programs which are able to solve given problems. A vast majority of problems appearing in programming contests are mathematical or logical in nature.
“Competitive programming” enters the record as mind sport. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Competitive, programming and mind can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Competitive programming” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.