A Few Algorithmic Puzzles (and Why You Should Care)

What does a typical competitive programming problem look like, and why might you care? I take apart the anatomy of a contest problem, go over where such problems live (from Codeforces, CodeChef, and AtCoder to Google Code Jam, the Informatics Olympiad, and ICPC), and set a little homework. Contests also have a research side: rating and ranking systems, contest problems as a showcase for programming language features, and what contests can teach us about computing education. There are also a handful of puzzles to try.