About 75,000 people entered the qualifying round of Facebook's 2012 Hacker Cup, according to a Facebook spokesperson. This is almost double the amount of participants who entered last year, 39,000.
But, only 500 will advance to round two.
The Hacker Cup is an annual event that bestows glory and t-shirts upon the participants.
David Alves, a Facebook mobile engineer with impeccable taste in sombreros, described it as an event with global appeal.
“Programmers from around the world will be judged on accuracy and speed as they race to solve algorithmic problems to advance through up to five rounds of programming challenges,” Alves wrote in a note on Facebook.
Facebook announced that competitors who answered merely one of the problem sets in the qualifying round advanced to round one.
"Scores for the qualification round are now final," reads the Facebook Hacker Cup Page, which has 178,647 likes.
"You can see how you did here: https://www.facebook.com/hackercup/scoreboard?round=146094915502528&target=me"
Round one, which starts at 10 a.m. on January 28, will further whittle competitors' numbers down; round three is when the rock stars emerge.
The top 25 high scorers will be flown into the in Menlo Park, California for a shot at $5,000 USD and title of “World Champion.”
Qualification round solutions can be found here.
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