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Google Programming Contest Winner
asqui writes "The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it."
It is great to see open source software such as google finally getting the recognition it deserves. Perhaps some of these algorithms (especially the winning one) can be incorporated into the Linux microkernel. After all, that is the beauty of open source. These features might be what gives Linux that "edge" over Windows that we have all been waiting for.
As an aside, I would love to use the geographical search code myself. In my line of work it would be immensely useful to filter through enormous databases of valid email addresses and select only those from a single area. I think the average 'Net user has a lot to gain from this technology.
Go Google!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Was that necessary Michael ?
I mean, no one here cares whether he worked for MS. And we certainly dont believe he got better at coding while he worked at MS.
And I am not buying the theory that Daniel Egnor is actually the alter ego of Mr. William Gates. His coding skills died with DOS!
Rapid Nirvana
(nt)
Zhenlei Cai, for his project, Discovery and Grouping of Semantic Concepts from Web Pages with Applications. This effort processed a corpus of documents and found words and phrases that tend to co-occur within the same document, producing a list of pairs of terms that seem to be closely related (such as "federal law" and "supreme court", or "Bay Area" and "San Francisco").
Laird Breyer, for his project, Markovian Page Ranking Distributions: Some Theory and Simulations. This project examined various properties of the Markovian process behind Google's PageRank algorithm, and suggested some modifications to take into account the "age" of each link to reduce Pagerank's tendency to bias against newly-created pages.
Thomas Phelps and Robert Wilensky, for their project, Robust Hyperlinks. Traditional hyperlinks are very brittle, in that they are useless if the page later moves to a different URL. This project improves upon traditional hyperlinks by creating a signature of the target page, selecting a set of very rare words that uniquely identify the page, and relying on a search engine query for those rare words to find the page in the future. For example, the Google programming contest can be found using this link.
Aaron Peapell, for his project, Genetic Search Algorithm. This project used a genetic search algorithm to bias a Pagerank-like algorithm in a query-specific manner, by giving higher weight to links from pages containing all of the query terms.
Dan Blandford and Guy Blelloch, for their project, Index Compression Through Document Reordering. This project aims to reduce the space requirements of an inverted index by clustering together documents that are similar before assigning numerical identifiers to the documents (leading to locality in the document identifier sequences within the inverted posting lists for the words in the index, thereby making the sequences more compressible with various types of encoding techniques).
All kidding aside, sounds pretty neat.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
Does this mean that when the time comes to leave this planet and move to Mars that we can still visit our favorite places via Google's Cache?
Let the IE lusers suffer !
Oh btw france lost vs. senegal. shame.
This is proof - the Google Programming Contest is dying. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the future of the Google Programming Contest. The hand writing is on the wall: the Google Programming Contest faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because the Google Programming Contest is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Google Programming Contest. As many of us are already aware, the Google Programming Contest wants boring ideas. Red ink flows like a river of blood.