The educational aspect of the competition is incredibly important of course! However, I think there's a big distinction here. Google are running a competition which has intrinsic educational value. That does not make it their responsibility to extract that educational value for you. As long as some contest analysis is posted at some point then I'm happy. If the analysis of all rounds was posted after completion of the whole competition that would be fine in my book. What they do is already a million times better than this, and there's really no expectation for them to perform better on this front. The people who want the analysis posted immediately at the close of the round are just being unrealistic.
CodeJam is the only programming competition I get involved with. I do it because I love the innovative problems, I'm very happy competing only once a year, and I love the model whereby I run the solutions on my own machine and only upload the output. I am never going to qualify for the on-site finals, and I'm really unlikely to ever win a T-shirt. Unless they introduce a t-shirt for qualifying for 10 consecutive years or something - that'd be sweet! I feel that I learn something every year I compete, yet as more and more people compete I find myself slipping further and further down the standings. I think that's great! Having so many people competing is really good! So, to sum up, I love everything about CodeJam, so I'm kind of offended on their behalf when your words insult the competition. Keep up the good work Bartholomew (et al), it's amazing and I'll be back every year you run it :) Paul Smith [email protected] On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Vexorian <[email protected]> wrote: > On Saturday, April 26, 2014 2:05:36 PM UTC-4, Aaron Chan wrote: > > It's top 1000 T-shirts. Regardless, it's just about the same as the > TopCoder open, which also only the top 24 people gets on site invites. > > Yeah, and it is also a big waste of time from a competitive aspect. > > Tournaments used to have far more on site finalists. GCJ had *500* onsite > semifinalists. The thing is that the incredibly low 24-25, is a great way > to ensure that the finalists are basically the same homogeneous group > always. > > Unless you are one of the top 50 or so. The only way you can really > justify participation in these things is if you are actually learning > something. Do notice that the context was a message that said that posting > analysis doesn't matter in GCJ because it is a competition and not a > course. I took offense to that because the educational aspect of these > things has always been far more important to me than the competitive part. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google Code Jam" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/a289282a-1b9e-48c9-9117-a9e9fbd19eda%40googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/CAJej63%2BTLCaP6chj4acHrC8yBR%2B3NMZjNwLcKRRFmPgveCzHAQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
