A Chinese student has won top honors in the TopCoder online programming competition hosted by Purdue University in Indiana, beating 48 other elite competitors from the U.S., China, Russia, Poland, India and other nations.

Yang Yi of China, from the middle school attached to Anhui Normal University, earned a scholarship worth US$15,000 for his win. Second runner-up was Neal Wu of the Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana, who earned $10,000 in prizes. Marcin Andrychowicz, of XIV LO im. S. Staszica in Poland, placed third and won $5,000.

The 49 finalists in the competition beat out dozens of other competitors in three online rounds of competition, said TopCoder spokesman Jim McKeown. Wu, the U.S. competitor, missed the top prize "by a heartbeat," McKeown said.

Each round of competition consisted of three phases: coding, challenge and system testing. The 2008 TopCoder High School Tournament began in December.

The coding phase is a timed event where all contestants are presented with the same three questions representing three levels of complexity. Contestants earn points for a problem when they come up with any solution that successfully compiles. Points are calculated on the total time elapsed from the time the problem was opened until the time it was submitted.

The challenge phase is a timed event in which each competitor has a chance to challenge the functionality of other competitors' code. A successful challenge will result in a loss of the original problem submission points by the defendant, and a point reward for the challenger. Unsuccessful challengers lose points.

The system-testing phase is applied to all submitted code that has not already been successfully challenged. If the TopCoder system test finds code that is flawed, the author of that code submission will lose all of the points that were originally earned for that code submission. The automated tester will apply a set of inputs, expecting the output from the code submission to be correct. If the output from a coder's submission does not match the expected output, the submission is considered flawed.

Seventeen countries had students in the final competition. There was one girl among the 49 finalists.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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