Sometimes I see information about competitions in computer sience. I feel sad, because I never had the chance to participate at one of those. Our school was'nt very dedicated to such actvities. Now the university I study at is very small and I have almost finished my graduation there. Last but not least participation at many competitions is limited to younger people or something similar. Example: Bundeswettbewerb Informatik gestartet [German]

But I'm sure that some competitions would be fun. And I'm sure there are more competitions out there with less restrictions and targeted to advanced participants. So I asked myself if this site wouldn't be a good place to collect and show some information about such competitions. Maybe we could even build a team, to participate together!

But step by step. First I would like to hear your opinion about this. Maybe we could evolve this idea.

I totally agree. +++1

Well, I don't know about Germany, but Canada has the Canadian Computing Competition. Then people who get the top scores go on to form a Canadian team for the IOI.

Hello everyone ,

in case you are still interested, there are plenty of great sites and opportunities to test and improve your (mainly algorithmic) programming skills around. Just to mention some of them:

• Probably the biggest annual world wide competition is the ICPC by the ACM. If your university does not already have an active team you can start some advertisement and get a group going by yourself! Unfortunately I never had enough time to get engaged there .
• As far as my knowledge goes, the largest set of challenges with an online grader, is provided by the UVa online judge. You can spend years of your live with those and keep learning more and more algorithmic twists! I love this archive, although you should be warned that difficulties vary extremely and some problems are less related to an efficient algorithm than to nasty details concerning the input and output formats . But as you can choose which problems to try this not a big deal. Best of all, the forum is full of discussions about the various challenges and the ranking shows you quickly whether you found a good (or probably optimal) algorithm or not. This is the real challenge, finding the most efficient algorithms! By the way, you will also find many online contests hosted over there.
• The USACO is a good source for training problems, especially if you are at school and preparing for the IOI. They also offer regular contests through which they choose their IOI teams, but those are open to all and an excellent preparation for the IOI itself! For beginners they have a fantastically arranged training section: You have to solve challenges section by section, and those are filled with great tutorials and sample implementations of common and useful algorithms.
  I can not recommend this strongly enough!
• Many other countries also have online resources and facilities for the selection of their IOI teams. A very extensive one is the Polish, and of course I have to mention the German one although they do not seem to have had a contest recently.
• And of course there is the massive TopCoder, with regular contests, professional participants, prize money, a distinctive competition system, and much more!

If you are rather new to algorithmic programming challenges, I would recommend to start with USACO's training pages (register there) and probably participate in some of their contests. When you get the feeling move on to UVa, there you have enough work for the rest of your live .

However I should warn you that once you started, this business might very well turn into a fully-fledged addiction which I take no responsibility of whatsoever! Also, moments like , and usually lead via , and to states around answered by and finally or ( comming immediately, the next day). Anyway, as you survived challenge sites I am optimistic that you can tackle these mental challenges showing up on the way .

Have fun programming ,

Erik

wow, that's an impressive collection. nice one erik. now i understand why my programming calls aren't up yet. anyway, i'll definitely be giving them a gander. thanks for this complete (and extensive) list.

If you want a jump start, there is a USACO running right now! It takes three ours I think and you can do it anytime until monday evening.

Basically I am stil interessted in those competitions. But situations has changed a little for me. I spend alsmost no time on this site in the last months. I have a couple of challenges which a worked on with progress but was not able to complete them, yet. Most challenges would take much more time than that I already solved. And my new girlfriends eats my time like it was chocolate!

So my time is short. But if there is a nice competition (maybe with managable time and effort) and some of you might want to form a powerful team, I would be glad to show the world who the 1337 ones are. Yes, megalomania is all mine! Harharhar!

I will have a look at the offered competitions at a later point in time.

May the force be with you. And don't mess with the alpha G33K. Muahahhahaha.