Component Design Competition Summary

by ivern,
TopCoder Staff
Friday, March 11, 2005


The TCCC component competition was actually two separate competitions: design and development. For the design competition, the participants were given a finished design on which they were required to perform a number of enhancements. Each enhancement on the list had an associated point score, which along with its review score determined how many points the submitter received for that task.

Before getting to the finals, the competitors had to progress through four rounds of online competition. The four competitors who obtained the highest aggregate score among their top three components advanced to the finals, which were also held online.

The design finals component was an instant messaging framework. It is essentially a library that provides a medium which enables users to interact with each other online using the Instant Messaging paradigm. The library will be the basis for building robust IM tools. Support for multiple transport protocols/mediums is included.

The enhancements the submitters worked on ranged from adding a logging facility to the framework to designing a server and a communication protocol for it.