I just have seen this nice screencast of someone coding for the Ludumdare 48h competition.
I seem to miss such contests most of the time and only hear about them when they ended. I would love to attend to some (if it happens that I have time), just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win).
Where would be a good source for such competitions? Where are they announced? I am following sites like Slashdot, Hacker News and a few similar Twitter accounts, though I either miss them at all or read about them when they are already over. (Or sometimes, though it seems to me that this is the minority: I currently don't have time and forget about them.)
Another fun competition I read about was the Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video. The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already.
Another fun competition I have read about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading such code is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to have clean, elegant and intelligent code, as less obfuscated as possible. :))
I would mostly be interested in AI competitions, gaming competitions or Open Source competitions (or all together).
Collected so far: Collections:
- Competitions collection on TIGForums
- "What are good programming competitions?" here on SO (similar but slightly different question)
- gamecomp mailing list that sends out announcements of the LD contests
- C/C++ Programming Competitions, Contests and Challenge
Specific contests: