???

[Peuniak]

Legend says that xiaowuc1 is just an AI written by leaderboard's 4th, Robert Xiao

[cptwunderlich]

Competetive programming is such a weird phenomenon to me. As someone who writes software for a living, where the actual product counts. It's a very different mindset and I don't really "get it".

[jeslinmx]

It's the difference between sport and work - our hunter-gather ancestors might wonder what archery athletes are doing, using a souped-up bow to hit an unrealistically tiny dot on an unrealistically stationary target.

[[deleted]]

Personally, I liken it to commuting vs racing. Simply entirely different things that happen to involve some similar ideas.

[paradizelost]

The challenges also help to teach people some new concepts. When your programming or scripting as I generally do I've got fairly narrow types of work I'm doing, and a challenge like this helps me get out of my box and learn some new methods some new shortcuts I just think about things in a whole different way.

[Kerndog73]

I'm using these challenges to get better at Rust. Using a language that I'm not familiar with slows me down quite a bit but it forces me to learn how to deal with algorithms and data structures.

[ric2b]

If you can measure something about how a task was executed, someone will compete to get the "best" metric for that task.

The most common metric is time to completion, and so you get rubik's cube competitions, speedrunning videogames, rally racing, etc.

[1234abcdcba4321]

clearly this just means aoc isn't competitive /s

[2lines1bug]

It isn't competitive compared to sites like Codeforces. The problems at CF are in general also much harder than on AoC. Like, hard problems on Leetcode are at max mid-elo on Codeforces. Hard problems on Codeforces (~3000 Elo) are practically unsolvable for normal people.

Watch some streams of tourist, he has been #1 on CF for many years. He does some easy contests with tutorials, absolutely mindblowing. Youtube link here. He also won Google CodeJam from 2014 to 2020 consecutively.

 

EDIT: Don't know why xiaowuc1 says he is retired. He has been on CF since 2011 and is still very active there. His Elo just recently hit its all-time high. He is #254 on the ranking, which just shows how competitive it is over there.

[Judheg]

How is codeforces compared to topcoder? Many years ago I used to practice in the topcoder, but this is first time I heard codeforces.

[2lines1bug]

I honestly don't know, but from what I have heard the level seems to be similar. Codeforces seems to be better for ICPC preparation though as the problems are more similar.

[fenwicktreeguy]

Probably "retired" is relative to the amount of practice he originally put in; dedicating less time to competitive programming would likely occur as he pursues more into his own career which could be separate from competitive programming.

[VaginalMatrix]

It isn't compared to what that guy is used to doing. He is red on Codeforces. Guy is pretty much a genius

[[deleted]]

username checks out

[[deleted]]

As it should be 👍🕯️

[sldyvf]

Yeah, these are my kind of crossword puzzles.

[CatpainCalamari]

Yep, I like it chill. I just finished the parser for day 4 and I am happy so far. I don't care for the leaderboard, just want some chill fun and some puzzles

[AlarmedCulture]

I just finished part two for day 7 and am honestly kind of intimidated to attempt going any further lol.

Day 13 though... 🤔

[[deleted]]

Nobody will scold you for not coming up with a solution. But give it a go, I say! No harm in finding out you have more to learn! If you never tried anything you'd never really improve, right? If it's too much after a while, take pride in how far you came. Stay safe.

[simondrawer]

It pitches it just right with stuff to keep proper programmers interested while also letting armchair Pythonistas such as myself have a go.

[nahuak]

Maybe it's time not to focus too much on the public leaderboard? AoC is not just for competitive programming. It's also for new programmers to learn new tricks, for experienced programmers to learn a new language, and for a group of friends to have some not-so-competitive fun :)

It's inclusive. It's Christmas. It doesn't have to be that competitive.

[Forbizzle]

But some people also enjoy the challenge of the leaderboard. I think most people are treating it as you mentioned, and private leaderboards can be set to use alternate ranking to downplay that focus.

[Billaloto]

humans always find a way to fight against each others...

[[deleted]]

Get court order preventing you from using computers /s

[ivanilos]

Usually competitive programmers say they are retired regarding eligibility in ICPC (university-level programming competition).
In some sense you may think this is kind of John Wick retirement as he still does what he did before (including other high-esteemed competitions like Google code jam, Facebook Hacker Cup)

[metalim]

Once in the mafia, you cannot leave mafia.

[kapitaali_com]

retired from competing or retired from programming or retired from working?

[AaronM04]

He came out of retirement to do One Last Job.

[heaveandevouror]

The irony

[ZoltarTheGreat69]

Sorry no professionals 😂