Three Indian techies crack Google code jam

Source: - Times Of India

BANGALORE: Three Indians, including one based in Singapore, are among the top five winners of a contest organised by Google, the world's largest search engine.

This was the third contest held worldwide by Google, and the first in India. The second contest was held in the US last year.

Ardian K Poernomo of Singapore and Pascal Alfadian of Indonesia bagged the first two places at the Google Code Jam contest, while the Indians – Rajsekar Manokaran of Chennai, Nishant Redkar of Mumbai and Sreeram Ramachandran of Singapore – won the third, fourth and fifth places

"We hope the contest will provide opportunities to attract strong computer scientists to our research and development centre here," Krishna Bharat, head of Google India's centre, said on Saturday.

"The contest is an extension of our annual code jam competition and celebrates the art of computer science, demonstrating to geeks the value we place on excellent coding."

"We were given three algorithms problems. The first was to find out the unique URLs (universal resource locators); the second was trying to find the shortest possible path and the third was to calculate the probable winner among the two in a competition," said fifth-placed Ramachandran.

"These problems were challenging. We had to choose one among two languages – Java or C++ - and were given two hours to solve the problems. Speed of thinking was the key to winning," Ramachandran added.

The first two winners received $6,900 (Rs 300,000) and Rs 200,000 ($4,500), while the Indian winners received Rs 125,000, Rs 75,000 and Rs 50,000.

Though 14,000 techies from six countries in South Asia participated in the online contest, only 500 qualified for the first round and 50 of them reached the final round.

A total of Rs 850,000 was distributed among the 45 other finalists.