Coding Competition, language agnostic guidelines?

I might be doing a coding competition soon, I was wondering if anyone made one and what where the guidelines/ process. I'd like to make the competition appealing to all devs, and I m trying to come up with开发者_Go百科 ideas as to how.

the scenario is: There is an event running and we(of the coding competition) will have a room that we can use (either to code or for questions, etc), however, ideally the task for the competition should be assignet and they should eb able to go and do other things, if they are so inclined. what i wonder is what kind of challenges to give, and most importantly, what is the criteria to "win" teaching and learning good coding standards takes a looong time, and I d like to think that if you ve been coding for longer you ll do things right and quick... but in a competition, you would be cutting corners... I would really appreciate your input on this

A competition that's appealing to all devs? That sounds... difficult. But if you want to make the competition about problem solving and algorithms, then I am a big fan of the Sphere Online Judge. Basically this is a repository of programming puzzles but you can also become a problem setter and create problems or contests on the site.

It supports a huge number of programming languages, from the "popular" ones to more obscure ones. Programs will typically read from standard in, and write to standard out. The standard judge program will simply diff a program's output with the expected output, but more elaborate judges are possible. You also set a time limit for the execution of submissions, which usually requires programmers to be more clever than brute force.

Winner is whoever solved the most problems. Ties are broken by time of correct submissions, with some time penalty for wrong submissions.

Guidelines

Limit the languages which can be submitted. If you don't, you may get proprietary languages which require a special purchased compiler or some other inconvenience.

Correctness

This is easy. Provide an easy-to-read unit test in all languages you will accept. This will allow simple, automatic testing of submissions, and will guide the interface of the solution.

Challenges

Create a theme. Make it focused, but not too specific as to require certain paradigms or language features. Then develop challenges based around that theme.

Assign points to each challenge. Give more points to more difficult problems. Be sure to review each challenge carefully and have a team attempt them before giving points so you can make a more accurate decision.

As @miorel mentioned in his answer, time limits and memory limits are wonderful. Set a time limit per test per challenge, or at least monitor them and have these metrics contribute to the points given for solving the problem.

You should look at the ACM competition. Each year they have collegiate programming competitions. These are language agnostic. The archive is located here.

http://www.ntnu.edu.tw/acm/

To start improve yourself, you need a project you can work on, a problem you want to solve, something you want to achieve. Without any context and a destination you want to end, you won't be able to learn all the necessary methods and all the connections of a language.

There is a competition, taking place 2 times a year, it is called ludum dare.
It also doesn't matter which language you are writing, you just have to create a game within 48h ( compo, just one person and all assets created by yourself ) and 72h ( jam, a team working together, can purchase assets ). After the competition when every uploaded his game, the voting starts. This will take like 20 days where everybody can upvote your game or you can upvote other peoples' games. There are taking part approximately 3000 people.

Every time the competition starts, there is a voting on 5 days in sequence. Everyday you vote on a set of themes which can be possibly the theme you will have to create a game for. My last competition had the theme "unconventional weapon". After the voting ended, the competition starts and you have to think about a game with (in my case ) an unconventional weapon and start coding a game you like.

This is not about being the best, you should start looking at other peoples projects after the competition ended. You can learn a lot of other people, ways they solve their problem and I am sure you would improve your self every time taking place in such a contest.

It's gonna be hard to designed a coding competition suitable for a wide array of languages, since languages typically serve different purposes. I'd suggest that what you're looking for doesn't exist.