I'm sure you guys have joined or seen competitions with totally weird judging criteria. For example the C/C++ online competition from India few months ago judge by number of semicolons you use, where the lesser you use, the better your code is. Way to encourage unreadable codes. I mean, it's not code obfuscation competition!
So I'm interested to know what do you guys think are the important things to judge in a normal programming competition?
There are two things to judge:
Solution Related:
Participant Related:
Some competitions additionally use a percent weighted scoring for a single problem i.e. you get a score for a problem depending on the percentage of the input dataset your solution successfully handles.
So, a good algorithm may score on both or just one. But, it usually is the better algorithm that wins.
I am sure there are many, many more alternatives ...
Mostly that it works, as specified in the rules of the competition.
Then elegance (in terms of design, not code layout).
Different competitions have different goals. The competition you pointed out was indeed not the normal type of competition, it was mentioned in the page that it judged on unconventional criterion.
Most competitions judge mainly on running time, next on memory usage, finally on the size of the code. Depending on the specific contest, other criterion are the number of submissions to the problem, and the exact time of submission relative to other participants, although these are mainly only for real-time contests.
Most of the online judges you are likely to participate in are evaluated automatically, through a simple piping and diffing process. It's not like there is a human being well versed in code-aesthetics sitting and reading through all the code, and judging you based on how beautiful it is.