I can speak from (two-year stale) personal experience. I attempted to use the site as a freelance marketplace. They have some interesting buyers. http://www.

I can speak from (two-year stale) personal experience. I attempted to use the site as a freelance marketplace. They have some interesting buyers. http://www.topcoder.com/asteroids/ http://www.topcoder.com/asteroids/ On this one, at the time I looked at it, any individual could code up a solution and submit it. Best solution wins money. There are other parts of the site. I'll refer to the "competitive Project Euler" stuff as Algorithm Contests. My conclusion (speculation) is that the truly interesting buyers (DoD? Fortune 100?) use the rankings board on the algorithms contests for some purpose. I also concluded that I am both too stupid* and too paranoid to hang out on [TC]. YMMV. * O(n)^what?