Topcoders get a quantum challenge from Wipro’s coding market

BENGALURU: Topcoder, a crowdsourcing marketplace for developers, plans to start administering coding challenges in quantum computing to build algorithms in the emerging area, its chief executive has said.

Topcoder, which became a Wipro company after India’s third-largest IT services company acquired Appirio, throws up challenges to freelance coders to develop software applications and algorithms for data analytics. It has 1.2 million developers, coders and data scientists located across the world, solving complex problems of organisations such as IBM, GE, and Harvard Medical School.

Mike Morris, CEO at Topcoder, said the platform will launch quantum computing challenges in the next 12 months. “It is a new way of thinking… a new dimension of trying to solve problems (and) take advantage of quantum computing technologies,” he told ET in an interview. “We are going to start running some challenges to get people familiar with the concepts.”

Morris likened the initiative to the time when there was a war on multicode chips 10-15 years ago that opened up new ways of programme algorithms. “When multi-code chip war was happening, AMD and Intel were running challenges on Topcoder. I think the same thing is going to happen on quantum computing,” he said.



The plan comes in the wake of growing interest among global corporations to build quantum computing systems to crunch data faster, or create algorithms for cryptography and cyber security to protect digital assets.

Increasingly, enterprises globally are hosting their critical applications on the cloud to enable their workers access data on the go. In India, many companies have become early adopters of cloud partly due to high investments involved in maintaining local IT infrastructure.

Businesses use crowdsourcing platforms to get software applications developed faster and at competitive prices. Freelance software engineers work on challenges posed by businesses for solutions such as app development, data analytics, and algorithms, and receive prize money, which could vary from $1000 to $10,000.