Can anybody tell me a bit about "topcoder?"

[thePope]

hey I was looking at the site topcoder.com but i still don't understand what kind of contests they have Does anybody have like an example problem they might have? What skills do they look for? thanks

[XSquared]

Its all speed-coding. When you participate in a contest, you are assigned to a room, based on your rating. There are 3 questions, each with their own point value. You can code answers to them in any order you want, but the points you get are determined by the time elapsed between you opening the problem and you submitting an answer. After the coding phase ends, everyone has a chance to look at other people's code, and they can challenge it if they think that it won't work. When you challenge, you enter a set of data which you believe will return the wrong results, and it gets run thru that person's code. If they return incorrect data, then you get bonus points, and they lose points. If they return correct data, you lose points, and they gain points. After that phase, the system runs each person's code with a pre-set group of data. Then, you get the results. Everything (including coding) is done in a Java applet. You have a choice of Java, C++(not C) or C#.