I have to tell a story I heard once about Brian Reid [0]. He was in one of these competitions -- this would have been sometime in the 1970s -- and they were given a deck of data cards and told to sort them. Most of the contestants started to write a sorting program in Fortran; Reid looked at the size of the deck and decided he could sort it by hand. He did, and won.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...