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Goodbye to Google Code Jam

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21–30 of 147 posts

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks citation?

[flagged]

I haven’t seen a clear answer on this actually - there was some confusion if the training data contained solutions for older problems, and if it underperforms on previously unseen ones. Plus it still seemed to underperform on medium and hard problems? Does anyone in the know have a summary on this?

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks citation?

[flagged]

Sometimes things that have been discussed as possibilities on this forum begin to be repeated and taken as fact. One might say that this forum has hallucinated the capabilities of this bot beyond its actual capacity, and the hallucination grows daily. A citation is indeed needed.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks citation?

[flagged]

I think it has only been shown that ChatGPT can solve easy/some medium leetcode style questions. I doubt it can solve difficult problems that would give human competitive programmers a hard time (for now anyway...)

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#25
Are nowadays good hackathons a good way to train for professional development? I used to compete in the early 90s in computing olympiads but now find that the work coding problems are more about integration of existing stuff that solving difficult problems. This is a generalization and talking about what is normal.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#26

Competitive coding has always been a bit of a joke, but it's a great entry vector for kids to get introduced to programming (and eventually software engineering). I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, though. I have always been suspicious that the existence of the game of competitive coding has been used to kind of justify the "leetcodification" of the tech interview circuit, and (IMO) that can't go away soon…

Why is it a joke?

It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked with. I have seen how they employ their rapid understanding, breaking down and debugging skills in real world programming as well.

Coming to this argument about even algo/DS interviews, could you suggest an algorithmic interview replacement, that is not time consuming, is objective, language agnostic and scales well with the size of a company? It is not like these companies are not having past experience, system design interviews. They do have them as well but they cover subset of what all you would want to check.

I would have expected to read more reasonable opinion on HN.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#27

Competitive coding has always been a bit of a joke, but it's a great entry vector for kids to get introduced to programming (and eventually software engineering). I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, though. I have always been suspicious that the existence of the game of competitive coding has been used to kind of justify the "leetcodification" of the tech interview circuit, and (IMO) that can't go away soon…

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

> There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode

What is the difference that you see between these sorts of algorithm puzzle contests?

Is there some reason that people who are good at one contest would be bad at another, similar contest?

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#28

Competitive coding has always been a bit of a joke, but it's a great entry vector for kids to get introduced to programming (and eventually software engineering). I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, though. I have always been suspicious that the existence of the game of competitive coding has been used to kind of justify the "leetcodification" of the tech interview circuit, and (IMO) that can't go away soon…

Why is it a joke? It is like any other sport or Olympiad, it involves solving faster, accurately and potentially of problems you haven't seen before. There is no direct correlation between competitive programming like CodeJam/ICPC and leetcode. They don't target the same audience at all. I couldn't get to the top of these but I do admire people who do, they are some of the absolutely brilliant people I have worked wi…

> problems you haven't seen before

Having seen similar problems really helps though.

Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam

#30

In general Online Rounds of coding competitions are no longer going to work. As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks. You can have it assisted, but this quickly becomes a “who can afford more compute” competition. RIP coding competitions. Incidentally, World Finals: up to 2020, it was held in a location in the US or Europe, and has been online since. Pretty incredibly, Gennady Kor…

>As GPT-4 had been shown to outperform humans on the coding competition tasks

On the same frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35297067

Food for thought. Also by their own paper it has only a codeforces rank of 392 which is below 5th percentile.

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