Google to hold programming competition in China

Hoping to attract talented Chinese programmers to Google’s planned research and development (R&D) center in Beijing, the company will host a programming competition, called the Google China Code Jam, it said Monday.

The winner of the competition will take home a pile of high-end electronics worth $5,000, Google said, noting that prizes worth a total of $30,000 are up for grabs.

The Google China Code Jam is an offshoot of the company’s annual Google Code Jam competition. The final event of the 2005 competition, held in September, was won by Marek Cygan, a university student from Poland, who won $10,000 in cash. Two other university students, Erik-Jan Krijgsman of the Netherlands and Petr Mitrichev of Russia, each won $5,000 in cash for finishing second and third, respectively.

Registration for the Google China Code Jam is open to participants from China and begins today, Google said. Registration ends on Dec. 12, when contestants will compete in an online competition to qualify for 500 spots in the first round for the contest. A second round of online competition will reduce the number of contestants to 200, who will in turn compete for the final 50 spots, it said.

The 50 finalists will win an all-expense-paid trip for the final round of competition on Jan. 20. The location of the finals has not yet been decided, said Melissa Zhang, an executive at The Hoffman Agency, a public relations firm in Beijing that represents Google.

The Google China Code Jam is being run by TopCoder, which also runs the annual global competition for Google. The contest is designed to objectively rate and rank the talent of competing software programmers, said Rob Hughes, the president and chief executive officer of TopCoder.

Instead of cash, the winner of the Chinese competition will return home with a new desktop computer, a laptop, a widescreen monitor and an Apple Computer iPod Nano digital music player, Google said.

Hiring for Google’s Chinese R&D is being overseen by Kai-Fu Lee, a former Microsoft executive who is at the center of a hiring dispute between Microsoft and Google.

Microsoft contends that Lee’s hiring by Google violates a non-compete clause in his employment contract. However, a U.S. judge ruled in September that Lee could begin working for Google on a limited basis to begin recruiting engineers for Google’s R&D center pending a trial over Microsoft’s claims.

In a statement, Lee said, “We are bringing the [Code Jam] competition to China as a way of reaching out to smart, talented people who enjoy solving problems.”

Whether Lee will be around to see the final results of the Chinese programming competition on Jan. 20 remains to be seen: the U.S. trial to determine whether he violated his employment contract with Microsoft starts Jan. 9.