stefdasca's blog

By stefdasca, history, 22 months ago, In English

Hello everybody!

As you already know, some high profile competitions, such as GCJ and TCO have been officially discontinued and there is clearly a lack of competitive programming contests with awards for the very best performers.

Given the size of the community we have here on Codeforces and on other places too, I think we can use our expertise and our networking to create a new series of competitions (and possibly in the future an organization to help competitive programming grow worldwide) to make up and even pass the existent competitions in prestige and awards. After all, the platform which will be used won't even matter that much, as I see it as a team effort to bring competitive programming to a higher standard in terms of prizes in competition.

For example, Codeforces got $125k when people donated for the 10 year badge, which is a lot of money used for expenses such as keeping the servers up, paying problem setters and paying the employees, among others. In my opinion, such a sum of money could help the community run a series of more highly respected competitions to award the best performers for a few years, while also helping communities grow.

Even though there is an economic downturn going on, I'm sure there would be a lot of interested firms in donating even sums such as $1k or even $500, plus as I showed with the Codeforces donations, a lot of individual donors. It doesn't take a lot of donations to at least make up for what was lost as a consequence of losing GCJ and TCO on a yearly basis.

Also, if competitive programming turns out to be more and more popular (that might require some format changes IMO), the income streams would also grow and this could only turn out to be more beneficial for the entire community.

I am aware this would mean a lot of organizing work and this is why I believe working as a team would help us achieve this goal, assuming it is something the community wants.

What do you all think about this idea? Do you think it has any potential to succeed?

I am looking forward to any potential suggestions on how to make things better from this perspective.

Let's have a debate on that and if things go well, maybe even start a conversation in a more organized way to get things going.

UPD1: My starting idea was something based on Titled Tuesdays from chess.com or Titled Arenas on lichess, if that helps. In short, we could organize biweekly or monthly contests with awards for the best performing contestants.

UPD2: I created a Discord server where we can discuss the ideas based on the blog and the comments added by people here.

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22 months ago, # |
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How do you see masters enjoying contests with awards? All the money is taken by Lgms. Useless idea imo

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    Don't reply "oh I mean hiring" because there is nothing about hiring in your post

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    I think a lot of people are attracted by the idea of earning shirts or even smaller money prizes for certain categories.

    This wasn't something which stopped GCJ from getting more popular.

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    For masters, you can try LeetCode Weekly.

    After a year of weekly contests, even someone like me (peak master) have won: a backpack, a notebook, a water bottle, and a hat with some random company logo. They also give out a generous amount of LeetCoin just for participating/ranking which I've redeemed for several tshirts.

    Though if you're doing CP for the monetary prizes, you should probably just get a job instead. I would say the main value of these prizes is to have a memento to remind me of the efforts I've put into this hobby. For example one of the weeks where leetcode didn't get a sponsor, they had fun prizes like "the right to name a character in a future problem" which to me is worth way more than some generic logitech mouse.

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22 months ago, # |
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Auto comment: topic has been updated by stefdasca (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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22 months ago, # |
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Also, if competitive programming turns out to be more and more popular (that might require some format changes IMO), the income streams would also grow and this could only turn out to be more beneficial for the entire community.

What kind of format changes do you think are required?

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    With chess, shorter time formats (blitz/rapid) have proved more popular when it comes to new people compared to the classical format.

    Similarly, I can see duels or lockout-like formats have potential of bringing way more popularity.

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22 months ago, # |
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I think it's a great idea! But before searching for sponsors/investments, maybe starting with organizing one-two prize-less competitions of the desired format could be a good idea. It is a lot of work initially, but it could help people see what they are actually investing their money in. Also, it would help offer some feedback on the format without having so much on the line.

Additionally, if the main intention is for it to make competitive programming more popular, at least t-shirt prizes for the participants somewhere around the top 1k would be of much help (I think it's one of the reasons why most competitions of this format got so many people involved).

Also, I know it's only a vague concept so far, but I would like to hear some of your ideas on the format, schedule, website, difficulty, and some more organizational parts. (and hopefully, others could offer their opinion on this as well).

And if this idea actually progresses further, you can consider me as a potential problem-setter or at least a tester for it :D.

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    Thank you for the comment and for your availability in terms of setting problems and testing!

    Firstly I think we should start from making sure the contest has viability (i.e: we can't just promise 1 million dollars if we won't even get to have 20k). In my opinion, the most important thing for any contest to survive is viability in terms of involved people and more importantly, the required budget. Community-made initiatives such as the Osijek camp proved such things can be done given enough teamwork and prestige so that was something which inspired me about the viability of such an idea.

    As far as prizes are concerned, we would ideally distribute all the money obtained from the community solely for the purpose of awarding contestants, paying problem setters and servers and of course paying anyone else involved in organizing the contest. Of course, given that people's money will be used, full transparency will be provided (here is an example on how Lichess does this)

    In terms of schedule I think biweekly contests would be ideal (monthly if we can't get enough money at first). The difficulty should be friendly for all the audiences, so something like a div1+div2 round would work. With more time and money, a better format can be discussed.

    I think we could discuss organizational details on either other blog posts or maybe even a Discord server.

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22 months ago, # |
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I've been following the recent cancellations of the GCJ and TCO for the past few days and I see there's a lot of tension in the community, but, I believe it's important to be honest with ourselves about the potential reasons behind them.

First, these contests have little to no direct business value for the companies that organize them, and historically, Chinese and Russian programmers have been among the most successful participants. See Code Jam Results By Country for context. While it is not clear why these contests were cancelled, some members of the community have expressed concern about the impact of political tensions on the decision-making process (especially TopCoder).

Personally, I find it concerning to think about the potential negative outcomes of these decisions. However, it's important to have open and honest discussions about these issues to ensure that all voices are heard and that decisions are made in the best interests of all involved.

While most competitive programmers are not involved in politics, it's difficult to ignore the fact that some decisions may be influenced by political factors. Look, the world order has been shifting in recent years, and global initiatives or idea like this one is likely to be impacted by these changes.

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    Yes, we all know about the political situation, but is it really a sufficient argument for cancelling GCJ and TCO? Russian and Chinese CP-ers play no role within the current political tensions, and likely these two groups aren't even the majority of participants in CP contests. Contest organizers who want to condemn the Russian invasion can, for example, allow Russian users to use the Russian peace flag as an alternative of the regular Russian flag, or ban the use of the Russian flag altogether (like what IOI did), but it's overkill to cancel the entire contest. Sure, global events must adapt to the changing geopolitical conditions, but CP, unlike semiconductors or telecommunications, has no use for the governments of global powers.

    I don't know about TCO, but in Google's case, I think it's just the company finding new cost-cutting measures, using the wave of lay-offs as an excuse which is only partly true.

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      22 months ago, # ^ |
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      Yeah, we all know that CP-ers aren't involved in politics. And, cancelling these contests might not have just been about politics. Maybe Google just wanted to cut costs, and TopCoder's decision-making process was influenced by several factors. Who knows?

      But some people do believe that politics might have played a role in these cancellations (e.g. TopCoder). These contests involve people from all over the world, and, of course, the companies organizing them might have considered how they could affect their image.

      Also, while CP unlike semiconductors might not directly benefit governments, it helps in finding talented people and building a community. These contests let people show their skills and the community in turn helps with promoting innovation and advances in the field of computer science. And, the impact of this community is evident particularly in China and Russia.

      So, the decision to cancel these contests might have been difficult and complicated. But, as members of the CP community, we should talk about these things openly and honestly.

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        22 months ago, # ^ |
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        There's a connection in that the heavier a company's involved in politics, the less it's willing to spend money for the good of a community which has a vague connection (tech) but doesn't have representation in politics. However, I'm really pretty sure they're really just throwing away stuff they don't care about to save money here.

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22 months ago, # |
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I think the lack of onsites is more concerning than the lack of prizes.

Instead of hosting biweekly contests (we have many) with prizes, I would like to see a new championship with 3-4 rounds and onsite finals (as it stands, we are set towards having none). Preferably with more onsite finalists than than GCJ or TCO, though the issue here is of course money. And I wouldn't even be ashamed to call this event just the "Competitive Programming World Championships".

To be honest, many of these company-organized championships have been fairly lackluster and perhaps out of touch. Many MHC, GCJ and TCO problems struck me as boring or unoriginal compared to the average Codeforces or AtCoder round. Maybe community-organized contests would just be better anyway.

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    One thing I thought of is making an onsite open to everyone or top X people from qualifiers, but pay for travel and accommodation for top Y (for some Y < X) participants.

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      22 months ago, # ^ |
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      Interesting ideas, I was thinking maybe at turning the existent contests into prized contests but I can see the reasoning behind keeping a schedule with fewer rounds, after all that should decide the tiebreakers in a better way.

      Your idea as far as the onsites are concerned is also interesting and given how the number of onsites is declining, we could just have a Competitive Programming World Championship as you said and have yearly editions where we could use the prizes to award the winners and everyone involved. Having such a name would probably help with getting sponsors too.

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      22 months ago, # ^ |
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      Yeah, Snackdown finals were very cool in that regard.

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22 months ago, # |
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Someone from Microsoft has to let their business people know that it's the perfect time to start a massive competitive programming competition with onsites and what not.

That would show it strong against Google/Meta, and it will keep the path they are following to be loved by programmers (on the same vein, they also acquired Github, the have VSCode, Typescript).

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    Much like Google/Meta, M$oft is having its next big round of layoffs. I don't think you're looking at the situation objectively.

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22 months ago, # |
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A bit related, I really miss all the 24-hour onsite competitions: challenge24/marathon24/deadline24.

They were so much fun!

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    22 months ago, # ^ |
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    Yeah, and now we will not have any single one of that format (TCO Marathon Finals was the last one, to my knowledge) :(

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22 months ago, # |
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Auto comment: topic has been updated by stefdasca (previous revision, new revision, compare).