Programming Contest

Today I stumbled upon a programming contest organized by Bulgarian Association of Software Developers and Telerik. I have not participated in such contests even when being a student. It would be weird if I participate now (8 hours workday in front of a computer is quite enough). But I have not solved algorithmic problems for a while and I have to admit I miss them :) My last project that required some algorithmic knowledge datea from about 3 years.

The contest's problem Clickomania seems interesting. The coding will be the easy part. The requirement for a C# implementation is probably a plus for me, since it has been my language of choice for the last 1.5 years. The real challenge is thinking of a fast and clever algorithm (and it has to be deterministic). Probably I also may have to learn a bit more about increasing managed code performance and choosing the right data structures. But if my algorithm is flawed and over-complex the little performance improvements will be of no use. I wonder if it is not a good idea if the table is large to use some heuristics and when it reaches reasonable size to try all combinations. Argh, this would be a lot of work- estimating performance and actually measuring it . But the prizes are good and it could be fun...