   topcoder competitions?
  hi guys i hope i am in the right section with this but could you tell me a bit about the topcoder competitions? are they quite easy? or do they require years of professional   programming experience? and for a teenager learning to program what sort of competitions should i enter?   
  Just look at the competitions and find out yourself whether you would be able to compete or not.   ;  usually there are programming competitions open mostly to high school students, they're good on college applications.   ;  My senior year in high school, I got into TopCoder for a few months.  Each weekly competition has three problems.  The first two are fairly easy, and the third is quite difficult (sometimes zero people complete it).  You get scored based on how quickly you submit your final answer to each problem, with bonus points for providing counterexamples to the solutions of your competitors.There are a handful of people that make a lot of money from winning these competitions.  The good news is that the people who are really good, but not good enough to actually win money, drop out pretty quickly.  As a consequence, I made it into the top 100 competitors pretty quickly.  The bad news is, the people who do make money at it are impossibly good at solving these problems.  You'll be hard-pressed to ever reach their level.That said, it was all a good exercise in algorithm design.  If I had a few hours free every week, I might get into it again.   