Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow topcoder too? What a shame. End of an era
they don't mention why it's ending?
GPT?
Goodbye to Google Code Jam
61–70 of 147 posts
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a cute prompt I saw on the same twitter thread ``` This is a variant of the monty hall problem: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. IMPORTANT: All the doors are transparent. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who clearly knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to…
> I wonder how gpt-4 does. The problem is that as soon as people started tricking ChatGPT 3 into problems like that, the correct answers are now being used to train the next versions and are going to be part of the dataset. So GPT-4 or GPT-5 may get the answer right, but that still wouldn't mean anything.
Fairly certain that is not what is going on here. GPT-4 seems genuinely better at reasoning and harder to trick from my testing.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#63In 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…
chess has had engines 100x better than magnus carlsen for years and it's not dead. people who have fun giving these competitions will continue having fun, while people who don't will keep crying that they're useless or dead or whatever.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#64Topcoder will also be having their final TCO this year: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201 Google Code Jam and TCO were the two biggest onsite competitive programming event that's not targeted at students. This is a huge blow to the sport.
To be honest, TCO being discontinued isn't that big a deal IMO. Maybe I'd feel different if I was a top competitor. However as someone middle of the road, competing is an atrocious experience.
The web portal is awful and barely works. The desktop client looks like it's from the 2000s and also barely works. To my knowledge the system had weird constraints about input size, and instead of reading from stdin like every other serious website they have the weird "write it in a class with this method signature" format.
Personally, the problem quality didn't compare to websites like Atcoder and most Codeforces contests, and i feel like most people (me included) don't enjoy the "hack phase" format. Maybe if i could bring myself to actually compete more often, my mind would change on these things.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main difference is the audience of both is different. Leetcode works like this. Company A is asking these 100 questions with this frequency; let me solve these questions so that when I encounter these in the interview I can solve them then. The whole premise of Leetcode is on giving a question bank to what is already being asked. The aim is to clear the base bar a company has set.
It makes sense why someone who is good at LC via pattern recognition might not be as good at competitive programming. However, it’s not clear why the reverse would be true. Surely someone good at solving unencountered algorithmic problems would be good at LC?
You're right, it's true - if you're good at competitive coding you'll be good at LC. But that's incidental. You don't even need to be a Div 1 competitor on (say) Codeforces to be great at LC - the bar is incredibly low. Just being average is more than good enough at interviews. Serious competitive programmers aim to solve problems much harder than Leetcode. Just look at some older ICPC and Codejam problems.
There are some people who basically just do competitive programming to be good for interviews, but they don't get very far - not even to div 1. They reach whatever bar is necessary to clear an interview and quit immediately. The people who seriously compete to go for ICPC World Finals or to get far in CodeJam, they aren't really concerned with interviews.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#66Competitive 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…
> 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 enough.
Everyone says this and then their replacements are time-wasting take-homes or raw credentialism. It's a drag to get ready for interviews but I think the fact that one at least has the opportunity to play on a level playing field regardless of what names are already on their resume is one of the best things about this career.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#67In 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…
chess has had engines 100x better than magnus carlsen for years and it's not dead. people who have fun giving these competitions will continue having fun, while people who don't will keep crying that they're useless or dead or whatever.
That requires a clear ruleset.
In chess it's very clear where to draw the line: no help allowed, you're on your own with your brain.
Where should one draw the line in Coding competitions? No ChatGPT? I guess most people would agree. No Copilot? Same as ChatGPT as the products seem to converge. No Googling? That too will converge to something close to ChatGPT.
If you can't look up information during a contest anymore, it comes down to memorization instead of problem solving. I am afraid the concept of coding concepts is dead indeed.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#68Topcoder will also be having their final TCO this year: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201 Google Code Jam and TCO were the two biggest onsite competitive programming event that's not targeted at students. This is a huge blow to the sport.
Thankfully CodeForces is still going strong: https://www.codeforces.com/
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Also a cute prompt I saw on the same twitter thread ``` This is a variant of the monty hall problem: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. IMPORTANT: All the doors are transparent. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who clearly knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to…
I've read your prompt several times now and still don't understand. It seems intentionally crafted to be confusing with messy punctuation. I get lost before finishing the paragraph every time.
Just a couple of years ago anything else than it responding "I don't understand" would be science-fiction and now we are surprised it's answering incorrectly on something even humans have a hard time to parse.
Re: Goodbye to Google Code Jam
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a cute prompt I saw on the same twitter thread ``` This is a variant of the monty hall problem: Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. IMPORTANT: All the doors are transparent. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who clearly knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to…
I've read your prompt several times now and still don't understand. It seems intentionally crafted to be confusing with messy punctuation. I get lost before finishing the paragraph every time. Just a couple of years ago anything else than it responding "I don't understand" would be science-fiction and now we are surprised it's answering incorrectly on something even humans have a hard time to parse.
The point of the prompt is that in the classic game you don’t know what’s behind the doors.
But in the variant of the game used in the prompt, the doors are transparent.
So in this variant of the game you already know what is behind all of the doors, meaning that you will already have been able to choose the right door, and also meaning that “revealing” what is behind one of the doors does not change the probability of what is behind the other doors.