September 7, 2019 — I have done many problems on Project Euler but I've never participated in competitive programming. The other day I got curious, what does the competitive programming landscape look like?
I started my quest by watching a great interview with a competitive programmer. Then I did some searching. Below are my results.
There are 16 major programming competitions
The first one started in 1970. A few of the newer ones are online only.
Most of them started or are hosted in the USA
The List
Below is the up-to-date list. You can contribute to it on the GitHub.
| series | type | started | wikipedia | firstHostCountry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IMO | Mathematics | 1959 | International_Mathematical_Olympiad | Romania |
| ICPC | Programming | 1970 | International_Collegiate_Programming_Contest | USA |
| ACSL | Programming | 1978 | American_Computer_Science_League | USA |
| IOI | Programming | 1989 | International_Olympiad_in_Informatics | Bulgaria |
| ICFPProgrammingContest | Programming | 1998 | ICFP_Programming_Contest | USA |
| TopCoder | Programming | 2001 | Topcoder | USA |
| TopCoderOpen | Programming | 2001 | Topcoder_Open | USA |
| GoogleCodeJam | Programming | 2003 | Google_Code_Jam | USA |
| IEEEExtreme | Programming | 2006 | IEEEXtreme | Online |
| CodeChef | Programming | 2009 | CodeChef | India |
| CodeForces | Programming | 2010 | Codeforces | Russia |
| AtCoder | Programming | 2010 | Japan | |
| Kaggle | DataScience | 2010 | Kaggle | USA |
| FacebookHackerCup | Programming | 2011 | Facebook_Hacker_Cup | USA |
| HackerEarth | Programming | 2012 | HackerEarth | USA |
| HackerRank | Programming | 2012 | HackerRank | USA |
| Advent of Code | Programming | 2015 | Advent_of_Code | Online |
Gennady Korotkevich
I came across one interesting stat in my research. Gennady Korotkevich is a programmer who is currently the highest rated programmer on all 5 of the major competitive programming sites!
Future work
It would be interesting to see trends in the number of participants and prize amounts in these competitions over time. I'm curious if eSports with prizes in the millions, will sap people away from programming competitions.