“A two-episode series which debuted on Chinese streaming platforms last week has been described as the first reality competition to focus on programmers,” reports the I Programmer web site:
The show, sponsored by the Ant Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group, is called Ranshaoba tiancaichengxuyuan, which roughly translates to “Burn Bright! Genius Programmer,” and followed four teams engaged on a challenge akin to the hackathons that take place on Kaggle and similar platforms.
News of the show comes in a report China’s first variety show about computer programmers seeks to mold Chinese IT idols in Global Times, the English-language newspaper published by People’s Daily, which is the official newspaper of Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Ji Yuqiao reported that twenty programmers took part in the show and were divided into four teams that competed to win a prize of 1 million yuan ($154,152). Some of the competitors were graduates of top universities such as Tsinghua University in China and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, while others were high school dropouts. Four professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University acted as mentors to these young talents on the show.
Contestants were tasked with protecting wild animals from poachers in a virtual world. With a time limit of 48 hours they had to design algorithms to detect and identify wild animals based on the limited data resources in the game.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ant Group Sponsors Reality Competition Show About Programmers
