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ACM Programming Contest Results

Posted by michael on from the brain-drain dept.

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!"

5 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. *woooooosh* by term0r · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Re:MIT is over-rated... by paulschreiber · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  3. compete against some of the winners at TopCoder by BigOneBitey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:MIT is over-rated... by Jonathan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Was anyone else... by Lictor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.