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ACM Programming Contest Results
An anonymous submitter writes: "Shanghai Jiao Tong University has won the 2002 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest with six of nine problems solved. Also solving six problems were MIT (2nd), University of Waterloo (3rd), Tsinghua University (4th), and Stanford University (5th). You can view the problems online, as well as the final standings. Congratulations to all!"
The ratios for 2002 Olympic medals were almost identical to this. Interesting Coincidence.
The thing about CIS and Comp.Eng at Waterloo, according to various people who are/were educated there is that the environment is totally nuts. I went to their 'campus day' a couple of years ago and I was NOT impressed. It was like nobody (in the faculty) was interested in talking to you unless it involved their current research project. Many people transfer away from the university because the courseworks demands are simply unattainable if you don't live in residence and have to take time away from the work to commute or have to worry about family life. Not to mention the course selection system (which used to be one of the best anywhere) is now totally haywire ... the software was written by their own students and the 'testing' was done by putting it into use and watching what happenned. This resulted in very much screwed up course selection and billing. As to exams, you don't know your exam schedule (or conflicts) until a couple of weeks before exams, while you know more than a semester beforehand at other universities.
That Fortran 90 wasn't one of the supported languages for the championship. They are allowing C, C++, Java, and Pascal. If you're a problem solver, you know your Fortran. And these are math problems, evidently. So I'm baffled as to why it's not an option. Before I see the deluge of "Fortran is dying" comments, it is still heavily used for engineering problem solving, I know for a fact, so don't give me that crap.
As an American who did a postdoctoral stint at Waterloo, I'm proud of UW's rating in the ACM contests. But like football games, I realize that that it has little to do with the worth of the university. Do you seriously believe that, for example, poorly funded Latin American and Eastern European universities are truly better than, for, example, Cal Tech? And yet that is what would be implied by taking the rankings seriously. Some schools are just really into the contests and have organized coaching and practice sessions, and other schools just don't care much.
Additionally, I'm always been amused by the Canadian ignorance of university tuition in the States. Sure private universities like MIT and Harvard cost a lot of money. But public universities are more or less as cheap as Canadian universties and still produce first class research. BSD UNIX was developed at UC-Berkeley. Mosaic (the ancestor of both Mozilla and IE) was developed at UIUC.
...even moderately offended by the lack of functional languages offered to the contestants?
(I'm (not (one) of those) rabid, foaming LISP advocates) that insists *everything* is better with functional languages... but... I do believe there is a time and place for just about every style of programming. Some of those questions looked very much like the "time and place" for a nice modern functional language like Haskell. Even Scheme would've been nice... Miranda, some flavour of ML... anything.
Perhaps there is some reasoning behind this that I'm missing. I guess I just thought it was sad that the ACM seems to be promoting the view that functional languages are too 'esoteric' even for use in a programming contest.