Thanks Everyone!

Please do not have high expectations. I really messed up the final round. Let's just say that several important factors were missing during the competition week (regular Internet connection/power supply, free time, moral support). It is for this reason that Faye's story attracted my attention in particular. She managed to pull off a win against all odds, and I have to give her a bow of respect for that.
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TopCoder's competitions are organized into two categories:

The algorithms category caters to the academic world. Here, fast thinking and analytical skills are needed. The contestants are given a set of problems that test for knowledge in CS algorithm concepts such as dynamic programming, memoization, and graph theory. Code solutions are then graded based on accuracy (you get nothing if you fail a test case), coding speed (the time it takes to submit a correct solution), and running time (you get nothing if your program cannot spit out a solution within 8 seconds).

The design and development category caters to the pragmatic world. Here, elegance and thoroughness are needed. Contestants are given a requirement/component specification, and they have a week to turn it into an elegant design/implementation. Knowledge of how to correctly approach a problem, apply design patterns and good programming habits will definitely help.

I know there are a lot of bright[er] coders out there (as evidenced by last year's ACM), and it would be cool to see more of them on the scoreboards.

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Apparently, my small group of friends aren't the only Go players in the Philippines. That's funny, given the fact that we [used to] spend a lot of time on PandaNet. Anyway, if you come across tcceledor (like I'd use ShindouHikaru on a go server ;-), necramirez or dart_mol on PandaNet, you'll know it's one of the LB people. =)

And they actually have Go boards here! Cool!

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