http://{域名已经过期}/digits/2009/06/08/shanghai-high-schooler-wins-coding-match/

By Marisa Taylor
Programmers and software developers from 17 countries met in Las Vegas last week for the annual TopCoder Open, seen by some as a world championship of competitive coding.
 TopCoder

Bin Jin, an 18-year-old from Shanghai, won the 2009 TopCoder Open.

TopCoder, a world-wide network of more than 200,000 independent developers, manages projects for companies, mainly through competitions among its members, with the TopCoder Open as the crown jewel. It begins in February with an online pool of 6,000 contestants, who are whittled down to 76 for the Las Vegas competition.
This year, Facebook and the National Security Agency were sponsors — and both are using the event for recruiting purposes.
The best of the best was 18-year-old Bin Jin, a high school student from Shanghai, who swept the algorithm competition and beat contestants with doctoral degrees, as well as Petr Mitrichev, a Moscow State University student and three-time world algorithm champion.
“I’m quite excited,” Mr. Jin said. “It’s surprising, because it is very difficult to win the TopCoder Open, especially for me, because I’m a high school student.”
What will he do with the $10,000 in prize money? “Maybe I will buy a mountain bike,” he said. He’ll be a freshman at Shanghai University in the fall.
Piotr Paweska, 40 years old, from Toronto, is a TopCoder veteran who has earned nearly $500,000 through its competitions. This year, he took fourth place in architecture and first in the specification competition.
“There’s some luck involved,” he said of his specification win. “The guy that I went against, he’s absolutely brilliant. It was so close that it could have been either me or him.”
Mr. Paweska has been working as a computer consultant since the age of 17, preferring to remain independent rather than working for a big company. But he joined TopCoder years ago because he loves the adrenaline rush of competition — he barely slept over the last few months working on problems for the two tracks he placed in, he said.
For the NSA, it’s a “way to attract top talent,” said Kathleen Hutson, a human-resources associate director for the agency. “This is a national event that identifies some of the best programmers in the nation under one forum.” The NSA has hired seven TopCoder Open contestants to date, she said.
Facebook decided to search for new talent at TopCoder Open this year too. “We have a lot of engineers here who have been in the competition in past years,” said Laurie Goler, its director of human resources at Facebook. “They encouraged us to look there for quality people. We’re kind of experimenting with it as a new channel for us.”
The social-networking site typically recruits at universities and through employee referrals but is trying to grow its engineering staff. “We’ll hire as many amazing engineers as we can find,” Ms. Goler said, though she’s not sure how many. “Ask me that question again next year.”