What is actually Facebook hacker cup?
The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition.
Hackers from all over the globe, compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory & sometimes cash at the coveted Hacker Cup.
It started in 2011; the Hacker Cup is Facebook’s annual worldwide programming competition.
FB Hacker Cup – Mission
Many will enter… only one will emerge as world champion.
How this hacker cup works?
Hacking is core to how we build at Facebook.
Whether we’re building a prototype for a major product like Timeline at a Hackathon, creating a smarter search algorithm, or tearing down walls at new headquarters, we always hack to find better ways to solve problems.
In the Hacker Cup, programmers from around the world will be judged on accuracy and speed as they race to solve algorithmic problems to advance through up to five rounds of programming challenges.
Format of Facebook Hacker Cup
- Qualification Round: 4 problems, 72 hours. Solve at least one problem to move on.
- Round 1: 4 problems, 24 hours. Score 30 points or more to advance.
- Round 2: 4 problems, 3 hours. Top 200 advance to next round.
- Round 3: 5 problems, 3 hours. Top 25 go to on-site finals!
Individual is supposed to make it to round 3, you have to score about 80 points & score them as fast as possible.
The qualification round is really simple as we have to solve one of the problems to advance to the next round.
Even people who never competed before in competitive programming can advance without difficulties.
On round 1 thing become more interesting and challenging. Not only the problems are harder as the number of people who advance to Round 2 decrease a lot for only those who got a score greater or equal than the top 500 are eligible.
From round 2 through the finals it becomes very hard to advance because of the very limited number of spots available and the difficulty of the problems.
Also, the Facebook Hacker Cup’s problems have a different style than that of code forces and Top coder, probably the best comparison would be with Google Code Jam who have a similar format.
Find more info about this mega event in Facebook official page.