... to the Operations Research Competition blog. This blog was established to allow people interested (or experts) in operations research to compete on a programming level against each other.
New competitions are published on a regular basis. The competitions are hosted on vWorker.com, so if you are interested in participating, simply create an account. All competitions have prize money for the winner.
While a competition is taking place, make sure to check the official blog post for updates and clarifications.
Format:
- An introduction is provided to give you enough understanding of the problem and what is required of you.
- The competition generally involves implementing one or two methods, or a class at the most.
- Unit tests are provided, which should be enough to help you understand the behaviour of the method(s) or class.
Rules:
- Programming language is C#
- The majority of points are awarded to the algorithm that is the most elegant.and passes all the unit tests. The main focus is for the code to be robust and easy to support and maintain. ( i.e. clean short code, that is easy to follow, with good performance.)
- You are allowed to create extra classes, and methods and even modify existing methods within classes if required. (However you need to let us know what has changed when you submit your answer.)
- You are allowed to submit multiple entries and fine tune your submission while the competition is still running.
- Competitions generally run for 5 days. (Most of the time they should only take a maximum of 4 hours of your time to complete.)
- If you have any questions or comments please post a comment on the competition page on this blog. i.e do not post your competition specific comments or questions on vWorker, we simply do not have the time to check them in that environment.
- Please include comments when making your submission and outline any changes you may have made to the existing library.
If several implementations are similar, extra points are awarded to:
- People who ask the least amount of questions. (We take a fair bit of time to get the specifications and the tests right. Reading and understanding what the unit tests do will allow you to answer a lot of your own questions.)
- People who provide feedback on some of the other code in the library that is not necessarily related to the competition being held.
- People who ask relevant questions or write extra tests to cover corner cases which we may have missed.
- People who provide a new perspective on how to tackle a problem.
Points are deducted if:
- Irrelevant questions are asked, which could have been answered by looking at the existing code or unit tests. Also the main blog page for the competition will be updated with clarifications during the course of the competition, so please check that page first.
- If you re-implement a method that already exists in the library.
Submission:
- Only submit the files that have been modified.
- All submission should be done through vWorker.com
- Include comments with your submission.
Winner:
- The winner is selected based on the rules outlined above. If several entries are similar and have the same amount of points, the one that was submitted first will win. Our decision is final and not open to negotiation.
If you feel you have a significantly better solution, as stated in the "README" section of the home page, money is always up for grabs.
Feedback:
- If you have feedback for us please feel free to use the contact us page.
We hope you find this an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Good luck!
