What is Competitive Programming?

Competitive programming is an activity where participants solve algorithmic problems under time pressure.

Getting Started

Choosing the Right Editor

Competitive programming is about quickly programming an efficient, correct solution to a problem. Naturally, in your computer science career, you'll need to choose a text editor or integrated development enviroment to work on. While there are a lot of text editors available for use, there are some that are highly recommended by ACM @ UCI users:

Reading Input

Most, if not all problems, require reading in some form of input and outputting an answer based on that input. Thus, being able to quickly and efficiently read input is critical to succeeding in competitive programming. Most programming languages have functions that read in input, including Python and C++.

That's it! While this may seem easy, many more coding paradigms and methods are often tied together in order for a problem to be solved. With enough practice and time, you can intuitively determine which of these methods to use when solving a problem.