TCO19 First2Finish Final Recap
On Nov 14th, 2019, the TCO19 F2F Final kicked off at Houston, Texas, USA! Ten finalists from around the world gathered together to compete for the glory of TCO final champion in a short four hours.
In this challenge, finalists needed to build an API based on the provided Swagger definition, using their preferred tech stack, that will add support for peer review phases on development challenges in our platform.
The peer review phase allows members who submitted on a Topcoder development challenge to evaluate other submissions from the same challenge and submit 'test cases' that cause the app to:
crash/throw error or break existing functionality
return wrong results/outcome
compromise security
There were three challenges in total, with challenges running sequentially and with increasing difficulty. The first two challenges had a submission phase of one hour and the third challenge had a submission phase of two hours.
Every challenge was the continuation of the previous challenge. However, even if a competitor completed a challenge early, he/she would have to wait until the end of the submission phase in order to work on the next challenge.
Each challenge had a separate weight on the final score. The score breakdown is as follows:
1st challenge: 200 points
2nd challenge: 300 points
3rd challenge: 500 points
The maximum total is 1,000 points.
Each competitor’s score was calculated based on the percentage of the passed test cases for each challenge multiplied by the challenge weight factor (2, 3, 5 for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd challenge).
An interesting aspect of this final challenge is that we introduced a time penalty rule. It was applied to all the submitters’ scores based on the time they submitted. The later they submitted, the more penalty would be applied. The maximum total time penalty was 50/1000 points.
The final challenge was very intense. After one hour, only phoenix103 got a score in challenge one. Then challenge two started immediately afterward. Later on, we saw more submissions and the leaderboard fluctuated. After four hours of intensive competing, we had the results below.
But this is not the final result. The final result will be revealed during the award ceremony on Nov 16th. In the meantime, all submissions will go through system testing.
Let’s wait and see who will be the TCO19 F2F final champion!