Facebook announces Hacker Cup

An article by Prashish Rajbhandari    4 Comments

In our previous post - Online Coding Zones for Programmers, we listed down online coding competitions for programmers to compete in. We are trying to follow up our readers with other such online coding competitions and we couldn’t miss the latest competition announced by Facebook. Yesterday Facebook announced  a new multi-round programming competition called – Hacker Cup. Following their other hacking competition Hackathon, “The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the coveted Hacker Cup.”.

The registration opens on 20th December, 2010 with three online rounds. The 25 finalists will be called at Facebook’s headquarters in California. The winner will be awarded  $5,000 USD along with the title ‘WORLD CHAMPION’, $2,000 for first runner-up, $1,000 for second runner-up and $100 to 4th till 25th rank holders. Also, t-shirts will be provided to the top 300 hackers coming out from the second online round.

The Fine Print

The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 7, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (4:00 PM PST) to January 10, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (4:00 PM PST). All registered competitors will be presented with three problems. Only competitors who correctly solve at least 1 problem will advance to Online Round 1.

Online Round 1 consists of 3 sub-rounds, each lasting 3 hours in length that are offered at different times from January 15, 2011 at 15:00 UTC (7:00 AM PST) to January 16, 2011 at 0:00 UTC (January 15, 2011 – 4:00 PM PST). Competitors who advance to this round can participate in any of the three sub-rounds until they qualify for Online Round 2. The top-scoring 1,000 competitors from each of the three sub-rounds will advance to Online Round 2.

Online Round 2 begins January 22, 2011 at 15:00 UTC (7:00 AM PST) and will end on January 22, 2011 at 18:00 UTC (10:00 AM PT). The 3,000 competitors will have three hours to solve the presented problem sets. The top-scoring 300 participants from Online Round 2 will receive an official Hacker Cup t-shirt. The top-scoring 25 competitors from Online Round 2 will be notified via email that they have advanced to the final round at Facebook.

Facebook will fly the top-scoring 25 competitors to Palo Alto, California, for the final round of competition on March 11, 2011, where they’ll receive some great cash prizes and other awesome goodies. Out of these 25 finalists, one champion will emerge and be immortalized on the Hacker Cup trophy.

Keep an eye on the Hacker Cup page at www.facebook.com/hackercup for more announcements as the January 7th qualification round approaches.

May the best hacker win!

Tim, an engineer at Facebook is writing a monster of a problem statement for the finals.

Official Annoucement