Google Code Jam 2003

Damn, I wish I'd known about this.

Granted, I'm not a hot shit speed coder. I like to take my time with a problem, work on it for a while, think about it and draw it out. But still, it would have been fun to compete in:

Google Code Jam 2003

There's a coding arena, and you have to solve coding problems in a set time frame. You also then get the opportunity to "challenge" other coders by breaking their code. I tried to open the arena to see what it was like, and check out some of the practice problems, but now that it's over, it won't let me in.

It looks like it was powered by www.topcoder.com, which I'm reading right now. They apparently have a lot of these competitions going on. I hope the competition isn't only in C++, because the only language I'm really good at is C.

Anyway, if anyone out there has ever competed in one of these, I'd love to hear about it. I'm thinking about entering some of these contests, if the problems aren't insane, and if I can code in C.