Some friends asked this question: In secondary schools we participate in the NOI, in university we participate in ACM/ICPC, TopCoder.What's the significance of coding competition to actual work? I participated in the NOI from 1994 to 1996, ACM/ICPC from 1999 to 2000 and TopCoder in 2002 for six months. Later I paid little attention to coding competition, so I may not understand the changes in recent years and race mode .