This site is great

On the other boards.. you guys were talking about a programming contest. This has got to be like the greatest idea ever.

www.topcoder.com

It's a web based competetion to test coding skills. It's really cool. Any of you guys want to join and give me a challenge? .

It's a quick screenshot of the coding action that I took for the first problem I encountered.

http://www.geocities.com/rpgnmets/programmingcontest.jpg

They have a money tournament open to residents of the US and Canada who are 18 or over at 10 est tonight.

Looks cool, but do the first place people in every room actually get $600, or is that divided up somehow? That seems like a lot of money to give away, especially with that many rooms. Do you know (somehow) where it comes from?

It's probably gonna end up like that they go out of business. Giving money away is a bad business model . They have given away over 300k... so yeah, everyone room winner in the > 1500 skill level gets $600.

Still, it's a great idea.. money aside.

Oh yeah, it's a really cool idea. I was just wondering if they tried to get all that money from banners or something. What kind of challenges do they give out?

The easy practice one went like this.

Write a class Shaky with method isSkaky that takes an integener and returns an integer. isShaky should determine if a number isSkaky, returning a 1 if it is, and a 0 if it is not. A number isShaky if the digits in the number rotate.

For ex,
132 isShaky
2134 is not (134)
323527241 is

etc.

is it not for Java only?

No, looks like you can use C++, as well

thats good then...

Currently, the C++ programmers kinda got the shaft . They made an ArrayList, String, and a couple other classes taken straight from Java and they kinda don't really fit in C++, but they needed them so that the questions would be langauge independant. But they are fixing that, should be more level playing field in a couple weeks.