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They used to give out money every week to [[coders]] who did well in the competions (weekly algorithm competitions are called SRMs -- Single Round Matches), in a business model that seemed paradoxically brilliant. SRMs are now sponsored by outside companies such as [[google]] and [[yahoo!]], and prizemoney is not awarded except for twice a year to winners and finalists of the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge (TCC, which is in the spring) and the TopCoder Open (formerly the Invitational, which is in the fall).
The business plan behind topcoder.com is actually rather interesting. One goal is to be a sort of recruitment center where companies can come and find programmers who are proven to be highly skilled. Another aim is to be an outsorcing center: TopCoder also hosts design and developement competitions in which coders can compete to solve real world problems that third parties have contracted for.
There is also something about modules...
''explain the module idea here''
In order to encourage noobies in the early days (who would have little hope of beating out the best coders for prizemoney) to stick around and compete, the ''Iron Man'' system was set up under which coders were grouped into rooms of ten according to skill level (determined by [http://www.topcoder.com/index?t=support&c=ratings rating]). After the contest, the top (3?) (highest scoring) coders in each room were paid according to the skill level of the room (winners in the room of contestants with the top 10 ratings were paid more than those in the room with coders 11-20, and so on). This created some paradoxical situations such as the possibility of comming fourth in the whole contest and getting no money, while the 111th placed contestant got paid, and gave rise to ''ratings diving''. Ratings diving, or taking a ''ratings dive'' was accomplished simply by doing very poorly on purpose in a particular contest (by opening and not submitting any problems or submitting incorrect challenges). As a result, a contestant would, in their next contest, be placed in a room with 9 coders among whom they had a good chance of winning some money. The idea was that the dramatically increased chance of winning money made up for the fact that the money to be won was a lesser amount given the lower average rating of the room.
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