A handful of those men whom students call when their computers won't cooperate gathered Monday night to pit their computer programming skills against one another in a coding competition.
Twenty students and one professor hunched over their computers in Stocker Engineering and Technology Center as they raced to solve algorithms and find bugs in their fellow competitors' codes.
I think we have some really good competitors here
said junior computer major Slave Jovanovski.
TopCoder, a company that identifies, evaluates and mobilizes effective software development resources, sponsored the event as part of its 2006 Campus Tour, according to a news release.
The College Tour is in its first year and came to Ohio University largely because Jovanovski submitted a request, said Brian Flood, TopCoder placement agent.
We ask to be invited. We go to schools where we have a built-in member enthusiasm Flood said.
The first part of the competition consisted of three word problems that required a code to solve that were consecutively ranked easy, moderate and difficult. Members also could choose to challenge the answers of their peers, gaining points if they were able to find a flaw and losing points if their challenge was unsuccessful.
Jovanovski, who has participated in 13 previous competitions, said he enjoyed the programming portion of the contest best because it is easier to write code than to find a bug in someone else's code.
Placing first in the evening's event and receiving an iPod nano was senior computer science major Hiep Dinh.
Dinh, a TopCoder member since 2002, has participated in 34 TopCoder competitions and holds his own not only on campus but also worldwide. He is ranked in the 94 percentile for online TopCoder competitions.
Second place went to Chad Mourning, a senior computer science major who just recently became a TopCoder member and has competed in two previous competitions.
Computer science associate professor and assistant chair David Juedes placed third and offered to give up his prize.
The 2006 Campus Tour has occurred at Georgia Tech and Whitworth College and will take place at the University of North Texas and the University of New Mexico, among others.
TopCoder, which offers free membership, hosts tournaments such as the 2006 TopCoder Open in Las Vegas, in addition to weekly online competitions. The company works individually with top scoring members to match them with top companies and sponsors, such as Google, Yahoo and the National Security Agency, Flood said.
TopCoder makes it so your resume doesn't matter as much. It lets you judge a person based on what they can do not how many years they've been doing it or where they got their degree
Flood said.
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Ohio University graduate student Adrian Gusa searches for errors in a computer code during a programming competition sponsored by the software company TopCoder Monday night. Students raced to solve complex algorithms and find bugs in each other's codes.
