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!"

Comments

Re:PDF

[CanadaDave]

WARNING: the above link contains a PDF link!

Your browser may not be able to handle this, and may produce an error message, or worse yet, it may display a blank screen. It gets worse...some browsers may show garbled text!!!!

You have been warned. I think this should be used as a standard disclaimer before every PDF link?

The following lines left intentionally blank

*woooooosh*

[term0r]

Thats the sound of those questions flying past way above my head...

Re:*woooooosh*

[NullStream]

Oh come now they are not that hard.

I'm no compooter scientician but these questions are not very difficult. The difficulty is getting all the programs written in the small amount of time (which is why I'll probably never enter such a content). I wonder if perl is allowed (would make a bunch of the brute force i/o and calculations brain dead rote work).

As for the questions themselves just taking the first question as an example:

You need a function to calculate the volume of a sphere and another for the volume of a cube.
Another function to increase the integral values by 1 until the value is equal to that of another point set of the other possible balloons or the box itself. (Knapsack problem if I'm not mistaken).

Then sum up the volumes of the balloons and subtract the volume of the cubes to get the answer to be output.

My tactic for doing these types of problems is black out all the superflous words and phrases and leave only the words which describe the problem (less distracting). Write down (with a pen) a strategy to solve the problem and do at
least one sample case by hand to make sure the
design is correct. Then code it out in C (because if you do it in any other language you are just being lazy hehhehehehe).

Basically these are all questions any third year computer science student can do on their own (or at least I hope so) but it would be fun doing this kind of thing as a team.

Re:*woooooosh*

[NullStream]

Looking at it again I must add that the 'code solving' problem is actually harder than it looks.

Time is your enemy.

Re:*woooooosh*

[lars]

Yes, they are usually harder than they look to the uninitiated. I'd recommend solving a few of them (try http://acm.uva.es -- they have an online problem set with an automatic judge) before dismissing them as easy.

Re:*woooooosh*

[NullStream]

I've done them before.

In high school we used to get similar problem sets every month and would hand them in for bonus marks as they were optional.

Too bad my university doesn't do the same for the various theory courses we have.

Re:*woooooosh*

[lars]

Sorry, I don't really believe you.

My high school had programming contests as well, but they weren't at all comparable to the ACM problems in difficulty (especially since you could get part marks for answering some of the test cases correctly), and I doubt yours were. Some of the problems at http://acm.uva.es are so difficult that only 3 or 4 people have solved them.

Re:*woooooosh*

[Wazm]

Heh, you may think these are easy, but they are not. The easy part is writing the program. The judges at these contests are very evil about testing.

Additionally, you have one computer to work on for a 3 member team. (At least the regionals were like this.) Perl is generally not one of the languages they use, but the language they use is dependent upon the region. Pascal, C/C++, and Java are generally the popular languages in these contests.

Re:*woooooosh*

[csbruce]

Too bad my university doesn't do the same for the various theory courses we have.

Prove that P=NP. Ten points. Plus Turing Award.

Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

Here are the final standings. Note how close Waterloo came to coming in at second place! (Note that only the first few items has penalty numbers attached to them)

Rank | Name | Solved | Penalty
1 Shanghai JiaoTong University 6 | 831
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 6 | 972
3 University of Waterloo 6 | 974
4 Tsinghua University 6 | 1186
5 Stanford University 6 | 1264
6 Saratov State University 5 | 532
7 Fudan University 5 | 678
8 Duke University 5 | 808
9 Moscow State University 5 | 856
10 Universidad de Buenos Aires 5 | 894

11 Charles University Prague 5
11 Royal Institute of Technology 5
11 Seoul National University 5
11 St Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics 5
11 University of New South Wales 5
11 University of Wisconsin - Madison 5
11 Warsaw University 5

18 Albert Einstein University Ulm 4
18 Belarusian State University 4
18 Novosibirsk State University 4
18 Petrozavodsk State University 4
18 POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest 4
18 Sharif University of Technology 4
18 The University of Tokyo 4
18 University of Oldenburg 4
18 University of Toronto 4

27 California Institute of Technology 3
27 Cornell University 3
27 Orel State Technical University 3
27 Queen's University 3
27 Sofia University 3
27 The Chinese University of Hong Kong 3
27 The University of Chicago 3
27 University of Calgary 3
27 University of California, San Diego 3
27 University of Central Florida 3
27 University of Otago 3
27 University of Texas at Austin 3
27 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 3
27 Virginia Tech 3

Honorable Mention
American International University Bangladesh Nanyang Technological University
Amir Kabir University of Technology National Chiao Tung University
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology National Taiwan University
Cairo University Saint Mary's University
Ecole Polytechnique Texas Tech University
Ewha Womans University Universidade de São Paulo
Florida Institute of Technology Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur University of Arkansas
Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero University of California at Berkeley
ITESM, Campus Monterrey University of Nebraska - Lincoln
LeTourneau University University of North Carolina
Messiah College University of Wisconsin - Parkside

Super-Region | Champion
Africa and the Middle East University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Asia Shanghai JiaoTong University
Europe Saratov State University
Latin America Universidad de Buenos Aires
North America Massachusetts Institute of Technology
South Pacific University of New South Wales

Re:Slashdotted already

[CanadaDave]

Congratulations Waterloo! Just proves that Canada is one of the best software programmer producing countries in the world. And Toronto was not far behind at 18th. So it looks like Canada had 2 teams in the top 20 and the United States had 4 teams in the top 20? Did I count that correctly?

Not bad for Canada, a country with 31,081,900 people, compared to the USA, with about 286,686,848 people.

Re:Slashdotted already

[AgileChen]

Does this mean China will start writing more software than pirating from others? ;) (It's nice to see fellow country-men taking good use of their math prowess. Since the problems in these contests are math problems in disguise, they may start dominating this area in the future, after becoming comfortable at expressing with keyboards than pens.)

Re:Slashdotted already

[CanadaDave]

I think the fact that they like to pirate stuff is a good sign that they may start getting involved with open source software. That's what turned me on to open source stuff in general. I hated paying for software because I am cheap. I was always a pirater, but now I don't have to, because Linux provides me with a legal way of using free software, and I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. So as long as they develop a moral conscious, they may switch to open source stuff. And it is a good sign that they won the contest, it's just too bad contests like this don't get more publicity to kids. Instead all kids see are sports athletes and entertainers, which are far worse role models than programmers.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

"Not bad for Canada, a country with 31,081,900 people, compared to the USA, with about 286,686,848 [census.gov] people."

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.

Re:Slashdotted already

[lars]

Waterloo had some problems with D. Their first submission was about halfway in, but was judged incorrect. They had 2-3 hours to fix it but never did figure out what was wrong, which is probably just bad luck. If they time spent on D had been used to do another problem, they would have saved a lot of penalty minutes too (of course, it's easy to say that after the fact).

The 3rd place finish is still very impressive, all things considered. Waterloo has now solved the same number of problems as the winning team (for which they now award the "gold medal") for an unprecedented 7 years, I believe, even though participation in the contest has more than tripled in that time and the competition is stiffer than ever.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

"Since the problems in these contests are math problems in disguise, they [China] may start dominating this area in the future, after becoming comfortable at expressing with keyboards than pens."

I think that the Chinese seem to be so good at math compared to north americans because all schoolteachers in China get to specialise in two subject areas: Mathematics and one of their choosing. (This is according to a friend of mine from that country.) I've seen many school teachers who don't have a clue about order of operations.

Re:Slashdotted already

[CanadaDave]

I'm going there (UW) next year for grad studies, and I had a really good impression of the university when I went there to talk to some potential research supervisors. In fact I carried on non-school/research related conversations with all 3 profs that I visited. About the school work being harder at Waterloo than other schools, I'm not sure if I agree with that. Perhaps the students there work harder, but I don't think the program could be much harder than any other school. There are lots of rumours like that about schools that aren't usually true. Waterloo is a large percentage engineering and math/sciences so a large proportion of the university is whining about how hard their programs are. At other universities, a much smaller proportion of students are complaining about their courses, while the Arts students are talking about how easy it is. This is how certain sterotypes are created.

About knowing your exam schedule a semester in advance, that is ridiculous. I've been at UBC for the past 5 years and we are always told when our exams are about 2 months before, not a semester. And that is only the exam schedule draft. The final schedule comes out about a month before.

Re:Slashdotted already

[crevette]

I'd beleive the rumors if I was you. A friend went there for one semester of his second year of Computer Science. He said that the easiest class at Waterloo was toughest than the tougehst class at his usual university and that he has '0' time to do anything else than homework and projects.

God knows we did a *lot* of Magic the Gathering playing back home!

Re:Slashdotted already

[The guy standing ove]

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

I believe you're talking about "Quest" which wasn't programmed by students, but by Peoplesoft. And it was pretty buggy.

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.

It's absurd to think the time saved by walking/biking to school or back would make any difference in the world. Sure there is a lot of work, but the hour you'd save by not commuting would not make the kind of difference you seem to be indicating.

As to exams, you don't know your exam schedule (or conflicts) until a couple of weeks before exams

You get the schedule about a month and a bit before exams. It would be nice to have it sooner, but how can an exam schedule be determined before people stop switching courses?

Re:Slashdotted already

[ryleyb]

You get the schedule about a month and a bit before exams. It would be nice to have it sooner, but how can an exam schedule be determined before people stop switching courses?

I dunno, but just about every other university manages to have the finals schedule done *before* you even sign up for the classes. So if you don't like that Psych101 final on the last day of the exam period, don't take it this term. Unfortunately, the mental genius that is Waterloo, cannot figure out this problem, while the mental midget down the street, Laurier, gets it right every term.

Re:Slashdotted already

[the eric conspiracy]

Hmmm -

Good for Canada, but Western Europe surely had a dismal showing. Nothing in the top ten at all.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Ian_Bailey]

There is a reason for this, which I learned from an administrator at UW.

There are basically two ways you can schedule exams. The first way is too let everyone pick their own classes, and then schedule the exams around the students so that everyone can write them. This is the format UW uses, and because of it, they can't even start forming the schedule until schedules are finalised (usually just past the mid-way mark).

The other way is to have each course have a pre-determined exam slot. This means that if a particular course has the same exam slot as another course, you cannot take it. This also means that the exam schedule cannot be optomised so that more people are done sooner.

So there you have it, the system is designed to get everyone out of there as quickly as possible. At the sacrifice at not knowing the schedule until much later, you can pick-and-choose whatever courses you want, and USUALLY be out of school a week before the last exams. (emphasis on the 'usually')

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

"IT IS NOT Slashdotted already."

Sorry I thought it was slashdotted ... I opened the site just after the article went up and it took about 5 minutes to load. I later found out that this actually happenned because someone else on this shared 28.8 connection was downloading a big image.

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

"I believe you're talking about "Quest" which wasn't programmed by students, but by Peoplesoft."

I stand corrected. A former w'loo Engineering student told me is was programmed by other students at that university.

"It's absurd to think the time saved by walking/biking to school or back would make any difference in the world."

I can attest to the fact that it DOES make a difference. Currently I drive to university (not waterloo) every day. And compared to my friends who live in residence, I have MUCH less time to do work. You see, I have to get up over 90 minutes earlier because I have to eat, shower, prep the car (remove snow/ice if necessay), drive, find a parking spot, walk from the parking to the lecture hall before class. While all they have to do is get up, wash their face, go to the 8:30 class and then eat/shower after it. And of course I don't have my computer and home resources on campus. I can't bring all my books with me (too heavy/bulky.) I have to drive home at the end of the day and help my younger brother with his homework and sometimes cook dinner (compared to friends on a meal plan.) That's 2-3 hours per day that the non-commuting people have over me. That's 120-180 hours per semester. Is it absurd that this much time would make no difference?

"It would be nice to have it sooner, but how can an exam schedule be determined before people stop switching courses?"

All they have to do is schedule the times but not the rooms. At my university, we know during course selection if we will have conflicts. This is especially important for people who are on weird schedules. We find out the exam room (which depends on the size of the class) maybe 2 weeks before exams.

Re:Slashdotted already

[CanadaDave]

28.8 shared connection. LOL. Whereabouts do you live? Or should I say what time period do you live in?

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

"28.8 shared connection. LOL. Whereabouts do you live? Or should I say what time period do you live in?"

I live in an area of rural Ontario that is ever sooo close to ADSL and Cable, but we are just outside the limits of the nearest large city and thus outside the broadband service boundaries as well. It is painful. But I will be working this summer in Toronto so it will be broadband heaven for me ;-)

Re:Slashdotted already

[csbruce]

The ratios for 2002 Olympic medals were almost identical to this. Interesting Coincidence.

So how does it go when you count the total number of metals presented, considering how large the men's & women's hockey teams were, curling, & team speed skating? ;-)

Re:Slashdotted already

[Myxorg]

The other way is to have each course have a pre-determined exam slot. This means that if a particular course has the same exam slot as another course, you cannot take it.

At my school, the only classes that had exams at the same time, had class at the same time. So you couldn't have taken both classes anyway.

Re:Slashdotted already

[DataSquid]

Amen to that. 4A here I come....

Re:Slashdotted already

[CanadaDave]

I'm just surpised you don't have at least 56k. I actually find 56k to be not too bad. I was on it up until August of 2001 when I finally got ADSL. I'm going to be moving to Waterloo in a few months, but I may end up living somewhere rural between Waterloo and London (which is where my girlfriend lives). I sure hope I can get high speed if I end up having to live there. Did you ever think about getting satellite internet from Bell ExpressVu?

Re:Slashdotted already

[Jucius Maximus]

There are >= 2 A/D conversions between me and all dialup ISPs so if we're lucky we get a 31.2 connection, but otherwise it's 28.8 all the way.

"Did you ever think about getting satellite internet from Bell ExpressVu?"

Yes but the TOS is terrible. Go read their 'fair access policy.' You will shudder.

Re:Slashdotted already

[ajknott]

Amen,

At U(W) in Math/CS, there were two types of courses: Those that you abused (electives) and those that abused you (CS). I once logged 105 hours of coding in a week, leaving 9 hours per day for food, personal hygenie, sleep and attending classes.

The pooled Unix (Solaris) resources were so over used for undergrads that the term "Sleep when the load is high" came into being: take down time when everyone else is using the computer.

Link to Online Conversion of PDF results

[sh0rtie]

If you havent Acrobat you can use this..

Programming Contest World Finals

Link to Online Conversion of PDF results Here

[sh0rtie]

ok i'll try again

http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=h tt p://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/Finals/problems.pdf

pdf to html

[mpjetta]

For those who are unable to view PDFs.

Here is the problems PDF in text format

Re:pdf to html

[sinserve]

The proof that you can't teach "common sense" in a CS class.
Here we have Adobe, a very successful software company, with
some of the finest minds in its arsenal.

Adobe's "engineers" did not think that it would be a good idea
to cache the pdf files they translate. So, now we have hits of
slashdot proportions, all demanding an on the fly pdf2html translation
of the SAME file, and dobe does every translation on its own, thus
reverse slashdotting the original site, costing itself CPU cycles/memory,
and costing us time!

What is so hard about a file-URL and a creation time-stamp key, that
hashes into an HTML file in an PDF2HTML database?

I know this is off-topic, but you would think Adobe would know about
common sense coding .. oh wait, this must have been done by their
cryptography department ;-D

P.S. this would never have happened if they released the PDF specs, or dumped
the conversion tool in some public site (e.g. simtel)

--

Re:pdf to html

[56ker]

Google give you the option of viewing a pdf file as either a cached html file or a cached pdf file - I suppose that doesn't affect people who follow a direct link but for those people (the vast majority) who go to websites from search engines it does.

Re:pdf to html

[XPulga]

Adobe has released the PDF specs, they're here (see the File Format Specification section).

I saw it and thought "cool, I'll make my own pdf viewer which just throws fonts away and displays text and images without screwing spacing like xpdf does". Except that the document is awfully written (that's what happens on tech companies hiring more lawyers than engineers) and contains several references to compression algorithms that are way too generic.

Re:pdf to html

[the eric conspiracy]

What is so hard about a file-URL and a creation time-stamp key, that hashes into an HTML file in an PDF2HTML database?

That still requires dowloading the original file on every request, thus slashdotting the original.

Re:pdf to html

[jimbolaya]

No, you can just request the HTTP HEAD, which will give you the modification date, among other data. Also, HTTP GET supports a syntax that basically says, "GET file if modified since..." That's basically the request your web browser makes, and how caching in your browser works.

Re:pdf to html

[Tom7]

I dunno, I thought the document was fine. It's not as good as an extremely formal (ie, practically executable) definition, but I was able to hack up a PDF writer in a few days from it. I remember what you say about the compression algoritms -- I just used code I found on the web called flate, and that worked. =)

Re:pdf to html

[XPulga]

writing in PDF is reasonably easy - there are lots of utilities and libraries that do it that are listed on Freshmeat, even a PERL CPAN module for creating PDFs. It's reading, formatting and displaying PDFs that is a pain to code.

Re:PDF

[Knightmare]

I would love to know why you can't view PDF (Portable Document Format) files. I just took a quick look at Adobe's site and there are 23 supported OSs in the pulldown for downloading the free acrobat reader. What kind of setup are you running that doesn't have that ability? I was going to post a link to a pdf2html tool but if you cant run acrobat nevermind.

Link to HTML Version Of problems

[Haxx]

Here is a Link to a HTML version of the PDF

Problems

Re:Link to HTML Version Of problems

[heliocentric]

That's lovely until you get a few pages into it and are told:

"CREATED WITH UNREGISTERED VERSION"

Question

[los furtive]

I'm impressed that I can picture everything logicaly in my head, but that's quite a bit of code, interesting as it may be. How big were the teams and how much time did they have?

Re:Question

[not_wybili]

There are 3 people on a team, sharing one computer. You have 5 hours to code.

IT IS NOT Slashdotted already

[Anonymous Coward]

IT IS NOT Slashdotted already. Prove the fucking bastard that tried to karma whore wrong by clicking here

Nice Lie Shit For Brains!

clarification

[Jucius Maximus]

parent

I've seen many school teachers IN NORTH AMERICA who don't have a clue about order of operations.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[paulschreiber]

oh, whatever. waterloo is a public university (think state school). while it's more expensive than Simon Fraser (damned deregulated tuition), it's almost an order of magnitude cheaper than MIT when you factor in the weak Canadian dollar.

UW CS tution is about CAD$5400/year. MIT tuition is about US$26,000 (CAD $40,000) per year.

Paul

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[epiphani]

University of Waterloo is just like every other Canadian University. It recieves subsidies from the Government to allow basically equivelent affordable cost on education in ANY field it offers.

Unlike the US, the Canadian post-secondary education system is relatively affordable and still a decent education. (Unlike secondary School.)

Please dont make assumptions about things you know nothing about, especially considering I was commenting on something to which I grew up within 20 minutes drive from. The UofW is without a doubt in the top 5 computer education schools in the world.

Re:PDF

[cscx]

It most likely has to do with the "Acrobat Reader isn't open source so I refuse to use it" argument that I once somehow got myself in the middle of on /.

compete against some of the winners at TopCoder

[BigOneBitey]

Many of the ACM competitors from English speaking countries compete weekly at TopCoder.

College students and professionals alike compete against each other to solve 3-problem sets within 75 minutes (choice of C++ or Java or C#).

Under 18 are allowed to compete as well, but not eligible for prizes.

I am quite surprised

[cscx]

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.

Re:I am quite surprised

[Bodrius]

I agree that Fortran 90 could have been allowed, but I'm not surprised.

Students simply don't know Fortran, it isn't taugth anymore. I seriously doubt it would be such a great advantage in these problems, but if it were it would put most students at a dissadvantage just because they don't know it anymore than they know COBOL. Sort of like allowing Perl for a string-manipulation competition if only 1/25 students had ever seen a line of Perl.

I don't think you have to know Fortran if you're a problem solver either. It's really not that great, and it doesn't seem so different to me as to give completely different approaches to the same problem. So I see no good reason why it should be taught more frequently either.

Sure, Fortran 90, is quite a decent language, and it's worth checking it out; far from the horror stories I had been told about Fortran, or the old Fortran code I had to read through a couple of times.

But there are many good languages out there, and since there are resource constraints, there's really no good reason to include Fortran if it doesn't bring something drastic to the table.

Four C-like languages are already plenty to handle. They were chosen obviously because they're the C-like languages used to teach in 99% of CS/CE courses.

I wonder, though, at the restriction of using only C-like languages. Being a collegiate contest, I don't think assuming some exposure to functional languages would be taking too much of a change, and that can definitely make a difference. Allowing SML/CLISP/Haskell would be rather interesting, if they make good problems.

Re:I am quite surprised

[andrewgaul]

Fortran is a non-existant language, as far as college students are concerned. At the University of Texas at Austin, the required(*) languages are C++, Java, some assembly, and usually one functional language (Haskell or Scheme). The better programmers usually learn one or more scripting languages on their own (Perl, Python, and sh being most popular). There is a remarkable lack of multi-lingual students; I've often wondered if this hurts them (thinking about problems more abstractly with higher-order functions, recursion, and coroutines).

(*) Our department has a policy of teaching concepts, not languages or technologies. Required is a minomer, but most students learn these in the introductory classes.

Re:I am quite surprised

[HoldenCaulfield]

I don't think you have to know Fortran if you're a problem solver either. It's really not that great, and it doesn't seem so different to me as to give completely different approaches to the same problem. So I see no good reason why it should be taught more frequently either.

My college transitioned to teaching C++ as the required language for the freshman engineers my sophomore year. (This was after I got to take my Intro to Comp Language class in Fortran 90.) Anyway, a lot of the professor still think this is a bad idea because of the fact that the vast majority of engineering code that is out there is in Fortran. Hell, even a lot of the new code out there is written in Fortran because it is the language that engineers know. From my understanding all of the major finite element packages out there are written in Fortran. with UI's written in various languages. Admittedly, when I was taking this Fortran class my freshman year, I was thinking it was ridiculous, but looking back, it actually makes sense.

Hark the past.

[WasterDave]

Page 2 - "This page is intentionally blank". IBM harking back to the good ol' days?

Dave

Re:Hark the past.

[mistered]

You'll notice page 16 is also blank. My guess: they printed the questions out on both sides of the paper. By making each question 2 pages long the contest pack could be separated into individual questions.

Re:Hark the past.

[IkeTo]

Right. Remember that the problem set is done by 3 contestents, not 1; and all of them share one copy of the questions. It is very frustrating having to read half of the question and wait for your peer to finish reading his part and give you the other half.

Re:Hark the past.

[gvc]

In the ACM contest, three copies of the problem
set are given to the contestants.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[DEBEDb]

As someone who went to MIT, I agree with this
somewhat - many A students in CS (Course 6
in MIT-speak, to prove that I did go there :)
could not program their way out of the
proverbial paper bag. However, who cares
whether one knows if poll() or select()
is better - if you have a solid foundation
and a drive, you can learn the intricacies
of the current tool (OS, language) easier.
Why should problem-solving abilities count
for less than practical knowledge which is
gained by experience? This is that kind of
a contest; if you want to judge the knowledge
of C/Unix, make your own contest.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[DEBEDb]

How's von Neumann? How about, say, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) -- all studied at MIT. Sussman
who created Scheme. Stallman and many GNU people
are affiliated with MIT in some way or another (yeah, I know Stallman studied at that liberal arts
school up the creek :)

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[NullStream]

Good point! I agree with you completely.

Re:PDF

[Gaurang]

This link converts from pdf to html, and from many other formats to many others.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[andrewgaul]

Another good deal for tuition is the University of Texas at Austin. It ranks at the bottom of the top ten for computer science(*) and is US$5500 for out of state and US$2500 for in state students per semester. A lot of the other departments are mediocre, so be sure you want to be a computer scientist (there's a LOT of attrition in our department) if you come here.

(*) This is important to some people and employers. Since I've never been to a "lesser" university I can't give an honest assessment of whether it is valuable. I will say that the professors are competent and there is lots of interesting research to get involved in. There is a big difference between the best and average students, but I suspect this is true at all schools.

You can use lisp too

[toomim]

You can, actually, use scheme as well as Java and C/C++.

Just make one person memorize the code for a scheme interpreter beforehand. Have him type it in at the beginning of the test (while the other students think about the problems), and voila -- your whole team suddenly becomes a couple-hundred IQ points smarter.

You just have to get used to writing scheme code embedded inside of a gigantic string constant...

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[dmv]

without a doubt in the top 5 computer education schools in the world.

What exactly does this mean? Without a doubt for a temporal, relative (and on the whole) meaningless value is a rather silly position to hold. Top 5? On what criteria? By whose metrics? Absolutes and Relatives don't mix.

Re:PDF

[swirlyhead]

Maybe he has a setup like mine, none of that glitzy windowing shit, just
pure text and curses. Lynx crosslinked with emacs to edit the text boxes.

Yeah I know it's retro, but I built the system up from a bare hard
drive and I know it and it's productive for me.

Bennies:
*Slashdot ads don't get in my face
*fast surfing on a dial-up link
*rock solid stable
*billg free and lovin' it

Re:PDF

[CoolVibe]

Ever heard of xpdf? Look for it at your favourite software repository.

You can btw always convert PDF to HTML at adobe's website for free. (sorry, too lazy to provide a link)

ACM Programming Contest

[Blue23]

I remember years past when I was on the team competing for my university. Locals, not International. One year we had several of our guys graduate (IIRC), and were short on filling in with CS students. Well, we ended up with a Chemical Engineer who could program, and I tell you it was a blessing. He brought a whole different viewpoint to the table on how to solve things, because of having different techniques needed for his discipline.

Iterative estimation of math problems to get the needed significant digits instead of actually trying to solve it, that sort of thing. Helped all of us open our eyes for "non-CS" ways to solve stuff.

=Blue(23)

Front Page..

[Pelostar]

What is the world coming to? Soon half the webpages out there will have the title 'New Page 1'..

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Jonathan]

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.

Re:"TopCoder" is a sham

[andrewgaul]

I question the value of a high TopCoder ranking for purposes of finding employment, but it is far from a sham. I get money to solve sometimes interesting problems and compete with my friends. The money isn't great compared to a real job (I average $20 per competition hour), but it's worth it if you enjoy solving these kinds of problems. TopCoder changed their compensation scheme about a month ago, which lowered most people's average winnings.

As for the buzzword compliance, remember that TopCoder is a business and recruiters are its customers. TopCoder is only providing what they are asking for.

Re:Smells like a trick...

[ackthpt]

I bet the MPAA and RIAA invented these question

Nah, if the MPAA and/or RIAA where behind it:

All solutions would be encrypted, copyrighted and patented

Winners would be told any monetary prizes were consumed in production, distribution, etc. (i.e. Hollywood Accounting)

The puzzles would have been more like: maximize the amount of breast that can fit in Britney Spears blouse, Phil Phnord can identify DeCSS code hidden in any webpage and since we don't want to pay him write a program to do it for us (hint: you won't get paid either), figure the amount of popcorn required to sit through the Titanic and time to get it assuming the concession line is always understaffed and there are no intermissions anymore during 3+ hour movies, create a program to automatically disable half the home entertainment media players with a new encryption scheme (all work immediately becomes property of RIAA/MPAA)

A new bill would be introduced into the US Senate declaring any who came up with dazzling solutions to be a national security threat

Copies would already be available on the internet and there would be a string of YRO articles blasting RIAA/MPAA for efforts to hide the solutions

Only competitors who look good or can passably sing or act would win, regardless of time to complete and/or accuracy

Somehow a bunch of useless pop stars would be snuck into teams to boost ratings

USACO

[datawar]

If anyone is interested in a programming contest for high school kids, check out USACO (USA Computing Olympiad). They have contests throughout the year (any country can participate) which lead up to the US Open (only US participates), a 5 hour, proctored contest which then determines eligibility to go to IOI (The Computer Science World Olympiad Training Camp) from which a few kids are chosen every year to represent the US in world competitions.

The contest style is very similar to the ACM (solve n problems in m hours) and often very interesting problems are given (just because it's high school, doesn't mean the kids are stupid :-).

If anyone is a computer science geek in high school or a teacher of CS in a high school, you should definitely check it out.

My contest story

[Reality Master 101]

When I was a sophomore(?) in high school around 1980, some friends and I entered a programming contest. I don't remember which one it was; it may even have been an ACM contest.

Anyway, we got a bunch of problems. I ended up taking the hardest one, which would probably take all the time allotted, while the others worked on cranking out the simpler one.

Here was the question: You have a salesman that must travel through a series of cities. Write a program to find the shortest route.

I had never heard of the Travelling Salesman problem before.

So I diligently tried to solve the problem. But for some strange reason, I kept running into cases that made it difficult to find the optimal, shortest route. I worked my ass off for the 2 or 3 hours that we had, and ended up running out time. I was sure there "had to be a solution", otherwise, why would they give us the problem?

It wasn't f***ing fair, and I'm still f***ing pissed about it to this day. :)

Re:My contest story

[ayf6]

Its an NP complete problem. If you found a way to solve this problem in polynomial time you'd be one of the revolutionaries in CS, up in the ranks of Knuth, Church, and Turing.

Re:My contest story

[Tom7]

Uh, there is a solution to the travelling salesman problem, it's just slow. In fact, it's totally simple! Why isn't it fair?

Re:My contest story

[Reality Master 101]

I know -- that's what was unfair about it.

Re:My contest story

[Reality Master 101]

Part of the score in the contest was running time. Sure, if you know ahead of time that the problem has no efficient solution, then you would just do brute force, or you would do an approximate solution and not waste your time on trying to find a correct solution..

What's unfair is that it wasn't a level playing field -- those who knew the "gotcha" had a huge advantage over those who didn't. It's not a fair test of programming skill if the primary test is whether you knew the problem already.

Re:My contest story

[Tazzy531]

That's like saying that gravity is unfair...P vs NP is a fundamental theory within computer science. Can't really argue that because it doesn't go your way, it's not fair.. :-)

Re:My contest story

[dimator]

I think he means it was unfair to give such a problem to a sophomore and expect a solution in 75 minutes.

Re:My contest story

[Fulcrum of Evil]

those who knew the "gotcha" had a huge advantage over those who didn't

This gotcha is one of the more famous problems in Computer Science. If you've been through at least 2 years of college, you should know about it.

Re:My contest story

[gvc]

Travelling Salesman belongs to the NP-complete
class of problems. It is not true that "there
is no solution" as claimed elsewhere in this
thread. There is no known *efficient* solution.

Efficiency doesn't matter if the problem is small
enough. The 1992 ACM finals has a travelling
salesman: (Problem B, "Getting in Line",
http://acm.uva.es/p/v2/216.html ) The trick
is to notice that the maximum number of nodes
is 8, so you can try all 8 factorial (40320) orderings.

Other NP-complete problems (maximum subset sum,
hamiltonian cycle, clique, independent set,
graph coloring, bin packing) appear frequently
in these contests. The trick is to notice that
they are hard and to find an approach (such
as brute force or dynamic programming) that will
solve the problem for the size given.

Re:"TopCoder" is a sham

[karlm]

My housemate bareley missed the semifinals (and a gauranteed $1000). He's gotten several phone calls from very interested recruiters in the past three weeks. I think his rank is currently between 25 and 30 out of some 10,000.

If you're up there, there are companies looking to hire you. They seem like good companies too, really interesting work. Unfortunately, most of them want to hire immediately instead of waiting until June when he has his Master's.

Every contest has it flaws, but I think TopCoder is pretty good at keeping my Java skills up. I tend to do all of my personal programming in C/C++, so I forget my Java-isms. It also teaches me some practical Java stuff that you don't learn in books. I was suprised as hell that Java lets you add and subract from character literals, for instance.

Most of the harder problems require dynamic programming to keep you from exhausting the JVM's memory or exeeding the 8 second time limit imposed to prevent infinate loops.

UCF: Daunte Culpepper and regular ACM finalist!

[BitMan]

Not bad, #27. But if you look at the SE US Regional Standings, we look even better! #1, #4 and #7 -- our undergrad teams regularly beat other SE US graduate teams. UCF has represented the SE US at the world finals for most of the competition's history, including they heaftier competition of more recent years.

UCF has never won #1, but they took #2 in 1987 and #4 in 1986 back in the Early Years. In the '90s, we've broken the top 10 at world only once or twice, but we've managed to place in the top 25 regularly.

A nice sign

[Ironfist_ironmined]

I think it is a nice sign of equality throughout the world, what surprise should it be that the country with the most citizens won? If China can somehow get its act together it can be a major world influence, because of its massive and massively expandable population. Youve probably heard all the news of their space programme et al., besides american universities came 2nd (MIT)and 5th (Standford), chinese (Shanghai) 1st and 4th (Tsinghua), there really isnt that much difference if you look at the scoresheets. Besides just because the govvernment isnt exactly uh... yea... I'm just saying i wouldnt have president Bush (who still enforces the death penalty, (though not to the extent of the chinese, in general) be my leader.

Was anyone else...

[Lictor]

...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.

Re:Was anyone else...

[White Shadow]

No, I don't think that the ACM thinks that there is anything wrong with functional programming languages. However, it would be difficult to have the one set of problems and allow both functional languages and procedural languages. Some problems would benefit from one type of programming language. To provide consistency and make the contest more "fair," they only allow languages that are similar in power and usage.

Although you raise an interesting point: why isn't there a separate contest for functional languages? I think that would be equally interesting.

Re:PDF

[jc42]

> I would love to know why you can't view PDF (Portable Document Format) files.

Just out of curiosity, I pulled my Kyocera smartphone (the one that runs PalmOS with IP and the Eudora web browser) out of my pocket. I thought I'd check out this news item and see how well it worked from this PDA (which is rather popular around here). I was underwhelmed.

First, I hadn't tried slashdot.org on it, so I had to do that. Jeez ... It took forever to come up, and the first zillion lines were filled with all that junk at the top with a list of links and what they do. Where's the story? Lots and lots of scrolling until I finally found what should have been at the top.

Once I found it, it was easy enough to read, so I clicked on the link to the article. The site told me in no uncertain terms that my browser was not compatible with the site, and it wouldn't send me anything until I got an acceptable browser. The only acceptable ones, according to the site, are AOL, Netscape and IE.

I also visited adobe.com to see about getting a PDF reader. They have one for PalmOS, but to get it, you first have to buy a Windows machine, because they only supply it inside a Windows .exe installer. If you have a Mac or linux or Sun or VMS or any other system, you can't get PalmOS software from them. Yeah, they obviously have the program, but you can't get it until you first pay the Microsoft tax.

So what am I missing here? Could someone explain to me just how easy it is to make this article's link work on my PalmOS gadget?

For that matter, is there a good way to read /. on a web-enabled PalmOS device? I did look around a bit, and found no clues.

The ACM contest is very outdated

[Tom7]

Yes, I agree. Not just functional, either; lots of their problems would be exquisitely tackled by a logic programming language like prolog or twelf. It saddens me that ACM is not progressive enough to encorporate even "known good languages" into their allowed set (yet would easily fall to Yet Another Procedural Language with corporate backing like Java).

There are lots of things that suck about the ACM contest, anyway. Personally, I think that the ICFP contest is much better, because:

- You can use any language, number of teammates, resources, etc.
- You get several days
- The problems are more interesting (sometimes unsolved)
- Work at home ;)

Re:The ACM contest is very outdated

[felipeal]

At least they have some sense of humor:

Problem B Undecodable Codes

Phil Oracle has a unique ability that makes him indispensable at the National Spying Agency.

(it would be even funnier if the guy was called Bill Oracle or Ellisun Gates, but then they would had gone too far...)

Re:The ACM contest is very outdated

[IkeTo]

Most people who has such a feeling of the contest should go back and check the question again, and think about what will happen if the input is really as large as suggested by the question. You can solve it the Prolog way and use backtracking and so on to find the solution. But the judge will simply answer "time limit exceeded" to your submission of answers, nothing else.

Re:The ACM contest is very outdated

[Tom7]

It's possible to write prolog programs with more efficient search procedures. But, I guess in those cases you're right, it might simply be easier to do procedurally. (Or at least would take a prolog expert..) Yet some of the problems that ACM has given *really do* call for backtracking search, and that is an awful pain to code in C in a short time.

But really, any problem that involves manipulating lists or other recursive data structures is *really* well suited to a functional programming language like SML. And type safety is a serious win when you need to crank out programs fast! The prolog thing was just so I didn't come off as a FPL nazi. ;)

Re:PDF

[1nt3lx]

If you have a Mac or linux or Sun or VMS or any other system, you can't get PalmOS software from them.

Let me just say that if your only other system runs VMS, you have considerably more problems than not being able to view PDF files on your PDA.

As mentioned above, you can convert between pdf and html on adobe's website.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[edmudama]

> If you define education as sitting in an
> institution doing whatever your teacher tells
> you and being graded on your obedience, then
> MIT fits in well. If you define education as
> accumulating knowledge, then you do not need to
> go to an institution to do that, just pick up
> books and start reading.

Clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

I would say that about one-third to one-half of my classes at MIT were of the first kind.

The rest were much more free-form, with open-ended 2-month long projects, creative works, etc, that allowed us to get into whatever we wanted to focus on, limited only by what we could learn in the given time. The amount of open-endedness only increases as you get into more advanced classes, and its really only the basic 6 (calc I, calc II, bio, physics I(statics+dynamics), physics II (electromagnetism+waves), and chemistry where the professors hold your hand and insist on a certain way of doing things. (Even those ways get argued by some of the students, who are given credit for being right when they are)

Re:PDF

[hockeythug]

To read slashdot on a Palm without driving yourself nuts, you need something like this: http://www.fourteenminutes.com/code/avantslash/.

There are several mirrors at the bottom of the page. Also great for folks who like to read slashdot via avantgo on their palms.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Pinball Wizard]

While im sure all of these participents are very good programmers and incredible mathmeticians, I'm fairly sure a lot of them wouldn't be able to tell you how to take two files on a Unix OS, and list only lines that appear in both in a single commandline.

sort file1 file2 | uniq -d

So, whats my prize ;)

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Hank the Lion]

While im sure all of these participents are very good programmers and incredible mathmeticians, I'm fairly sure a lot of them wouldn't be able to tell you how to take two files on a Unix OS, and list only lines that appear in both in a single commandline.

sort file1 file2 | uniq -d

So, whats my prize ;)


Hm. Doesn't this also show lines that appear twice in just one of the files?

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Reality Master 101]

I can't decide if you were being serious, and thus proving the guy's point, or if this is some subtle attempt at humor.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[paulschreiber]

University of Waterloo is just like every other Canadian University. It recieves subsidies from the Government to allow basically equivelent affordable cost on education in ANY field it offers.

As of a few years ago, the Ontario government deregulated tuition in certain professional programs (law, medicine, optometry, etc.) and some ATOP (Access To Opportunities Program, an expansion of "high tech" programs) ones (computer science, computer engineering), etc.

If you actually read the page I gave you, you'll see that tuition varies by faculty and program. Arts is $4400/year, while Computer Engineering is $6700/year.

Please dont make assumptions about things you know nothing about, especially considering I was commenting on something to which I grew up within 20 minutes drive from. The UofW is without a doubt in the top 5 computer education schools in the world.

First of all, I don't believe you, because anyone from Waterloo calls it UW, not "UofW." Second of all, I have a BMath (Computer Science) from the University of Waterloo (2001), so I know a thing or two about their CS program. :-)

Paul

PDF ("bad CMAP"?)

[Tablizer]

(* Could you please warn us before handing us a PDF link. A large number of us dont have the ability to read them. *)

I do have a PDF reader, but it gave me funny error messages about a "bad CMAP", whatever the fudge that means.

However, rather than skanky math and combinatorial problems, why not give more **practical** problems, "write a PDF viewer in less than 2000 lines of code" (or a token quota or an EXE size quota, etc.)

Or give them more time and have them write OSS modules.

In may almost 1.5 decade of programming, the closest I have come in the real world to those kinds of problems is to write a license-plate typo matcher for a smog-check organization based on license plate and name/address, both of which may be mistyped. I had to look at the patterns of errors, for example, license "123ABC" may be mistyped "ABC123", etc.

However, even that is not representative of the majority of programming issues that I face on a day-to-day basis.

I suppose it is more cerebral than football games, but still lacks in the paycheck reality department IMO.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Thomas Wendell]

I don't know where you get data to support your statement, or why knowledge of Unix command line programs equates with programming skill.

I'm a Unix novice, but it's plain to me that your solution is wrong. Consider:

file1:
one
one
two

file3:
two
three
four

output from "sort file1 file2 | uniq -d":
one
two

correct answer:
two

Way too academic and math oriented

[mesocyclone]

This programming contest looks much more like an odd math contest and one that measures skill in computer programming.

Almost all of it is about optimization problems. I see little place for real-world issues like abstraction, concurrency, standardization, business problems (i.e. unstructured complexity).

I am sure it is good fun, and is a good predictor of math intelligence, but I would not call it a programming contest.

Then again, Computer "Science" has all too frequently been treated and taught as a wierd form of math, when almost all uses of it are in engineering. This may be one reason for the embarassingly slow progress in the field.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[bmetz]

And I suppose you've come up with just such a set of problems and a methodology to judge them? Didn't think so.

Your complaint is common but poorly thought out one. Yes, in some magical theory land where CS professors frolic in a field of daises maybe this would work out great. Software elegance in a timed environment is a dumbass idea. The high pressure environment is completely at odds with slow,deliberate,well thought out designs. If you're timed the most appropriate situation is "get it to work at all costs".

Most often the people who raise this complaint are people who were kicked off a programming team or never qualified in the first place.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[mesocyclone]

You seem to have misread my comment. I am against the magical theory land. I have been a professional programmer since before there *was* a discipline called computer science. Please read more closely!

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[mesocyclone]

Generally, a field of study ending in the word "Science" is not a science, but rather a field desiring the status accorded a science.

Examples: Social Science, Political Science. Note that although some refer to Physics as "Physical Science" - the real term is Physics. Same in other areas.

In computers, the term Computer Science is truly bizarre, because there is no natural phenomenon to study. More suitable names might be:

Computational Mathematics (for those who want the pure math approach)

Computer Engineering (for those who want to learn how to do something real with computers, and understand what they are doing).

Computer Programming (for those who want to learn how to program computers without understanding what is going one behind the covers).

When I first started in computers, there was no such field as "Computer Science." There were three departments in the typical university that were teaching computer related classes:

Math - generally taught a lot of obscure stuff such as formal linguistic theory (useful if you are devising a new computer language - for all three people who do that), computability theory, and other interesting theories that very rarely are used by those who actually work with computers (although some of the results may be very important).

Engineering - Two variants - typically with many courses in common: Those that focused on building computers, and those that focused on using computers- typically in Fortran.

Business - generally taught with the computer as a black box that could do things if programmed in Cobol.

I do not mean to sparage any of the the above ways of studying computers. All have their place. But to give them all a name ending in Science - or to even give them all the same name - is nonsense!
To this day, Computer Science suffers from the problem of definition.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[pclminion]

Almost all of it is about optimization problems. I see little place for real-world issues like abstraction, concurrency, standardization, business problems (i.e. unstructured complexity).

Well, you see, that stuff isn't difficult.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[mesocyclone]

Wrong. It is extremely difficult in many cases.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[IkeTo]

With the constraint that the contest should be timed, should be about coding, should be language neutral (to different languages), should be reasonable to be completed within one day, and should be judged objectively rather than subjectively, I see no alternative. Will you care to suggest some?

More importantly, whatever your contest rules, there are some skills needed in programming that is not tested at all. Will you say that it "is not a programming contest" because they don't test the skills in those areas?

Come on. A contest is there to give motivations to work hard, and to gather people so that different bright people can meet each other and share ideas. There is no ``ultimate game rule'' that tests everything. And that is not the objective of the contest.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[mikera]

I agree it's extremely difficult in many cases, but that is because of the human/management dimension rather than the programming complexity.

The coding is easy.

Re:Way too academic and math oriented

[DuranDuran]

> BOYCOTT GOOGLE ADS! - They have refused ads for firearms!

Oh poor baby - so you can't see ads for guns while you surf? Aren't there enough guns in the world?

Grow up!

DD

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Pinball Wizard]

Well, I was being facetious, but since you asked...

1 - I am assumming duplicate lines have already been removed from file1 and file2. I don't know how you could remove them and find the same thing in both files, all in one command line.

2 - Knowledge of command line programs doesn't necessarily equate with knowledge of programming, but the two aren't necessarily exclusive, either. Unix command line programs are designed to be strung together at the command line with pipes and frequently have several command line options. What if I told you that sort file1 file2 | uniq -d used the quicksort algorithm and performed its task in O(n log n) time? Does the fact I solved a problem with the Unix command line make my solution any less relevant?

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Pinball Wizard]

no it was more like saying, you think that is the equivalent to an ACM contest question?!!

purely being facetious :)

Re:USACO and ACSL

[wass]

There is also the American Computer Science League (www.acsl.org) for junior high through high schoolers. In addition to programming, there is a written test.

I was in ACSL back in high school, this is the first time I've heard it mentioned on slashdot. Was it really small beans that not many other American slashdotters have done it?

It was pretty cool back in high school (for me, i graduated in '93) the school would fly us out to miami or houston or other places for the all-star competition at the end of the regular season.

The programs were usually doable, the test was tricky because most of the time it was following very closely syntactic and algorithmic details to determine the value of a variable when a loop exits, etc. The tests were mostly bookkeeping, though. It was really easy to miss a small detail, and get the question way wrong. There were a few, but not too many, computer-science type questions (such as figuring out how nested a particular recursion loop would be, which would take WAY too long to run through manually on paper), representations of Finite-State Automata, etc. But most of the normal questions just involved base 2, 8, 10, or 16 math and conversions, and/or running through algorithms on paper, keeping manual track of all flags and stuff.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[csbruce]

Smart canadian kids with $$$ go to UofW.

It doesn't cost an arm & a leg to get a university education in Canada. This is why there are so many educated Canadians available to go to work in America. Er, wha...???

The main thing about U(W) is that you need impossibly high grades to get in.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[csbruce]

First of all, I don't believe you, because anyone from Waterloo calls it UW, not "UofW." Second of all, I have a BMath (Computer Science) from the University of Waterloo (2001), so I know a thing or two about their CS program. :-)

I thought that Mathies were supposed to call it "U(W)". ;-)

Re:well...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

well there you go - somebody with more experience has a huge advantage. How surprising is that?

U(W)

[Succa]

All things considered, UW isn't a bad school. I'm in my last year of undergrad there (Computer Science), and it does provide a very wide-reaching CS education, with ample possibility to explore specialized areas in your final year.

Unfortunately, the city ot Waterloo itself is a pretty drab place with not much to do, and the surrounding student ghettos are pretty unsightly. I can't think of any fourth-year students who aren't counting down the days before they graduate.

Re:U(W)

[CanadaDave]

Yeah, the town of Waterloo is fairly ugly looking. And I went to the Kitchener farmer's market to look for some food on a weekday, while I was there. The farmer's market was closed, so I ate in the trashy mall. But the mall stunk like a petting zoo from the farmer's market located on the ground floor. It was gross.

Public? As in...

[cassandy]

You can get it if you've got the marks? Well, yeah, duh. Isn't that how every university is/should be?

I'm a student at the University of Waterloo, and we're not quite a 'state school'. We get funding from our government (which is a province, btw, not a state) and private industry, but all of the students have to pay tuition. Which, if you're a foreign student, costs $24 000 a year, instead of the $5 400 Canadian students pay (our government subsidizes half of the cost of tuition)

You might want to recheck your facts.

And tuition isn't deregulated in Ontario yet. :P
Silly.

Re:Public? As in...

[paulschreiber]

I'm a student at the University of Waterloo, and we're not quite a 'state school'. We get funding from our government (which is a province, btw, not a state) and private industry, but all of the students have to pay tuition.

Yeah, I know how UW is funded, I went there. :-) I said "think state school" for our American friends. UW is a lot closer to a state school (UC Berkley) than a private one (Stanford) in terms of its funding model.

If you read the UW overview, you'll see that it is described as a public university where the provincial government pays 55 percent of the cost of the education.

Which, if you're a foreign student, costs $24 000 a year, instead of the $5 400 Canadian students pay (our government subsidizes half of the cost of tuition)

You're off by a factor of two. International tuition fees are CAD$13,700 (USD $8500).

You might want to recheck your facts. And tuition isn't deregulated in Ontario yet. :P

It is, for certain programs, like computer science, medicine, law and some engineering disciplines. See this Gazette article from 1998.

Check your facts.

Paul

Re:"Pacheck Reality Department". I like it. :)

[Bamafan77]

You don't mind if I shamelessly lift this phrase from you, do you? Thanks. :)

Re:"Pacheck Reality Department". I like it. :)

[Tablizer]

(* Re:"Pacheck Reality Department". mind if I shamelessly lift this phrase from you, do you? *)

Sure, but it will cost you $29.95 per usage. I got bills to pay you know.

...just kidding :-) Go ahead.

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[Q2Serpent]

Bash:

(sort file1 | uniq -d; sort file2 | uniq -d) | sort | uniq -d

Re:Esteeee....

[IkeTo]

Solution: of course, work it out yourselves. :)

Penalty: each correctly answer carries a penalty, which is the amount of time elapsed from the beginning of the contest until the correct answer is received, plus 20 minutes times the number of time the same question is submitted with an incorrect answer. So the penalty listed is simply the total penalty (less is better).

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[paulschreiber]

I thought that Mathies were supposed to call it "U(W)". ;-)

Nah, that's just mathNEWS that does that. And yes, that is how they spell it.

Paul

program for prbl 2

[mennucc1]

it happened that I proposed (almost) the same problem at a seminar in Nov 2002, and then I solved it. My program does not find the shortest string; but it also understands if a code is 'uniquely infinitely decodable' that is if it can decode strings of infinite lenght in an unique way. It is based on a known technique, see [Cover Thomas], with some improvements. This program also shows that the problem is polynomial complexity in n,k where n=number of words k=maximum of letters in a word.

And the answer is...

[nekosej]

Strange how 42 is the answer to every problem...

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[thirty-seven]

Yeah, why does mathNEWS do that? I'll be entering 4A in Computer Science at UW in May, and only recently have I noticed U(W) as opposed to UW. I can't figure it out. Is it some joke I'm not getting...?

Batch Processing?

[MattGWU]

Did anybody else conjure up images of batch processed punch card runs when reading over some of these problems? I don't know if it's the IBM backing of the event or what, but I got images of geeks sitting at punch card writers feeding an old Model 704 numerical representations of oil-filled polygons in card form and waiting for it to spit out an answer. The questions are interesting enough, and I'm even taking a crack at a few on my own time, but I can't shake the images!

Am I going insane?

Re:UCF: Daunte Culpepper and regular ACM finalist!

[rmadhuram]

Good job UCF!
I was in the programming team a few years back and we finished 6th in regionals. I think all of our teams finished top 10 that year. I was the only grad student in the team, but it was a nice learning experience.
I hope these achievements show up in the university rankings. Way to go Dr.Orooji!!

Re:MIT is over-rated...

[sgups]

Amen to dat. Its harder to get into comp eng here than to get into CS but harder to stay in CS as opposed to comp eng where the faculty does all it can to not kick u out. In CS, they try thjeir damndest or so it feels in the first 2 yrs or afetr taking 370:)