Competitive programming

[3] A programming competition generally involves the host presenting a set of logical or mathematical problems, also known as puzzles or challenges, to the contestants (who can vary in number from tens or even hundreds to several thousand).

From 1990 to 1994, Owen Astrachan, Vivek Khera and David Kotz ran one of the first distributed, internet-based programming contests inspired by the ICPC.

Irrespective of the problem category, the process of solving a problem can be divided into two broad steps: constructing an efficient algorithm, and implementing the algorithm in a suitable programming language (the set of programming languages allowed varies from contest to contest).

Normally, contest problems have an all-or-none marking system, meaning that a solution is "Accepted" only if it produces satisfactory results on all test cases run by the judge, and is rejected otherwise.

However, some contest problems may allow for partial scoring, depending on the number of test cases passed, the quality of the results, or some other specified criteria.

Online judges have rank lists showing users with the biggest number of accepted solutions and/or shortest execution time for a particular problem.

The competitions also attract the interest of recruiters from multiple software and Internet companies, which often reach out to competitors with potential job offers.

[22][21] Also, by offering only small algorithmic puzzles with relatively short solutions, programming contests like ICPC and IOI do not necessarily teach good software engineering skills and practices, as real software projects typically have many thousands of lines of code and are developed by large teams over long periods of time.