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TopCoder, Math, and Game Programming
reiners writes "DevX.com has an interesting interview with David Arthur (dgarthur), the 2003 TopCoder Collegiate Challenge winner. Arthur discusses many interesting topics: the similarities between TopCoder problems and math problems, why TopCoder performance is positively correlated with 'real-life' programming performance, and why game programming is where the action is."
programming 3D rendering engine. that is where all the action is. i learned more about linear algebra while writting 3D rendering libraries, then i did during the course of my degree. :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Top Coder: "What? This isn't done yet?"
Bottom Coder: "No, your Code Mistressness!"
Top Coder: "You pathetic little worm! Get back in there and code until your hands bleed!"
Bottom Coder: "Right away your worshipfulness!"
Expect to see more ads for "Dominatrix" pop up in Silicon Valley...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I find it interesting that a math double-major, who's considering becoming a math professor, uses C++ as his language of choice, with Java coming second. Not Lisp, not Scheme, not Haskell - C++.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that fact, I just find it interesting.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
Those 3 don't happen as much in the real world as one would hope to think. Very few companies do code reviews correctly, nor do most programmers spend enough time testing their algorithms.
I would look at a Top Coder victor the same way I would look at someone who can answer trivia questions correctly. The experience is incredibly valuable, but I wouldn't say that they are parallel at all. Most of the questions and tests are biased against people who have experience doing competitions. A veteran programmer would probably perform 10x better in a real world environment, and is much more valuable than a TopCoder winner who is still in school... but I could be wrong.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
hehe you must have scored REALLY bad on the competitions to have this kind of attitude. From my experience, I have a relatively average score (~1400) and have nothing but the utmost respect for the true "top coders". Being fast is just one part of it, algorithm knoweldge and language mastery is a must-have to be competitive like these guys are.
It really depends on how you define "action". Encryption seems to me to be even more exciting a field. It isn't as glamorous as game programming, but the math involved is amazingly interesting (advanced number theory, primality), and good encryption tends to last for longer than good game engines.
3D rendering is not entirely about math (probably a lot more to do with studying the brain and how people generally interpret images that they see). Encryption however is ALL math. Anyhow, that's my 2 cents.
Wow, someone who won top coder is saying it's a good indication of real world ability.
In other news, Microsoft says Windows is the most reliable, and George Bush says America is the best.
In other words he's smart enough to know even he can't get a job programming, and so it's a waste of his time to try.
A friend of mine hired two AMERICAN programmers for 6$/hr last week. I told him he could get them for $4/hr in India, but he doesn't like remote workers.
The party is over. Move along.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
David went to my highschool, Upper Canada College (Canadian version of Exeter/Eton), and he was a couple grades below me.
:) i.e. No girlfriends. Maybe university has changed him now, I dunno.
Sadly, he had the misfortune to be at the school while the Canadian High School Math champion was there so he didn't get much glory in the math department.
He is a smart dude, but was incredibly socially inept
Anyways, he wrote a complete 3d FPS game in ~ grade 10 . He also crushed everyone in the Waterloo CS contests.
Yup. There wasn't a challenge. I did them for awhile. When they used to pay for all competitions, I learned it was better to stay in the bottom ranks. There you could take a room on one question, the easiest because all you needed were language tricks. When it was just Java, this basically meant that you learned all of java.util and java.lang packages. Basically my strategy boiled down to this:
1. Read the easy question.
2. Recall the Java class/method that shortcutted the problem.
3. Write 3-5 lines of code (not including the class and method header).
4. Score near max points and be done before everyone else and sit for the rest of the round.
5. Challenge round, slam the people that tried to finish as fast as you. Chances are these people made a mistake and if you knew the problem, you knew what to look for right away.
Most of the time I'd also just open the last two questions so I knew what to expect if someone did finish them, but the bulk of the people in the lower rooms would never even get to finish them in the allotted time, if they did, you could almost always count on it being wrong. So long as I didn't answer the big questions and let my scores inflate, I never moved out of those rooms and I never saw a point in it. The only point I saw in getting to the higher rooms was to make the invitational. Yeah I'd love to win $100,000 but at 1 in 64 kids (back a year and a half), my odds weren't that good anyway even if I thought I was talented enough to win (which I know I'm not).
This is not real world coding and I would NOT encourage colleges to become involved in Topcoder because most of their philosophies go directly against what professors are trying to instill in up and coming programmers. You are not encouraged to design, comment, test or even read the problem thoroughly in these competitions because it all costs you valuable points. Whether or not these are valuable skills in the real world, I'm still growing up and learning.
well after 69 comments (hehe), there has not been a SINGLE one discussing the competition problems, all three of which are quite interesting.
/. lowers productivity. making people spending way too much brain power on stuff that's completely unrelated and time consuming. heck; i might lose sleep over this.
especially the hard one, probably, because my mind is drawing a blank on how to have it implemented... (no i didn't cheat and look at the solution).
heh, actually they go like this:
*easy* - okay, i can think of a algorithm. probably not the fastest thing in the world, but it should work out.
*medium* - have a haze of an idea on what an algorithm might look like. with enough caffine it MIGHT solidify.
*hard* - at least I understand the problem, but curses on the restrictions of a binary tree =)... no idea on algorithm that would finish executing before the end of the universe. (granted, only 50 elements, so maybe it's possible brute-force)
Damn; this is exactly how
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The top level guys competing in topcoder are some of the smartest guys you will ever meet. Whoever thinks they are a coder, go ahead and try a competition. Its free and they do it a couple of times a week. See if you can even get the easy problem right. I dare you.
p.s. Topcoder also has the best Java client side applications going. Their competition arena application/applet is a masterpiece.
no i don't work for them. Yes I have competed.
in case people will probably not bother to click, it goes something like this:
you have three days to do the programming task (72 hours), and you submit it via email. you can use whatever language you want, etc etc. here is an official quote:
the cool thing is thisanyway... the money isn't as good, but I like it much better. btw the winner for the 2001 one used haskell, and second place used Dylan, ha! eat my (shorts), Arthur. =)My life in the land of the rising sun.
hmm . . . with topcoder being a timed contest, where points are awarded dependent on speed, and the coding phase being 75 minutes for three questions, that quick and dirty serves a need? We're not talking large scale projects here . . .
I had a competitor comment to me once that while lots of others don't mess with objects, he does, just because he likes the structure and makes his debugging easier, even for tournaments . . . most others skip them because it's a level of conceptualization that can be skipped . . . modular code doesn't serve much benefit in 75 minutes . . . (well, unless you're referring to STL . . . )
And really, should the university be responsible for teaching you that stuff? In my experience, the best way to become a better programmer is to program and have other (more experience) people examine your code and give you feedback, and to look and learn from other people's code. If you're smart, you learn very quickly how to program for "the real world" when put in a job environment.
Say what you want, but for the math gifted, most of them will code in Occaml, or one of the Meta Languages (ML), if they ever come across them.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I did a 'sort of' competition thing (it was actually a study in how programmers program), and I found that the problem was nothing like what I meet in the real world:
In general, I suspect these competitions reflect academic computing, producing nice and small programs. The real world is more like Google's pagerank software, a simple idea, but complicated by all sorts of issues like Bloggs and Googlebombers.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
If students were taught how to visualise the math they are suppose to be learning, they would pick it up much faster. You will find that ALL people who are good with math have a natural capability for visualizing the concepts. It is my firm belief that visualization technique can be taught. I have done just this while tutoring. I found Linear Algebra extremely easy because it was so visual.
game programming is where it's at... it is of course the chicks. awwwwwwwwwwwww yeah, it's all about the cs babes.
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
change halfway through the task
Wow you're being generous. My favorite is when it changes hourly.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I don't normally read SlashDot, but after a friend pointed out this post to me, I had to check it out. Having done so, I couldn't resist making a couple comments.
"I find it interesting that a math double-major, who's considering becoming a math professor, uses C++"
I don't see much use for computer programming at all in mathematics, except in applied areas that don't interest me. I learned C++ because it was ideal for game programming, and I learned Java because it was taught in college and used at the company where I worked.
"Maybe there is some kind of speed math problem think tank that secretly controls the world around us"
Amazingly enough, it is actually possible for certain people to do more than one thing, including math research and contests. For example, I once met this guy who could walk and talk at - get this - the same time. It was pretty crazy.
"With looks like those... it's no surprise he has nothing better to do."
Yeah, screw you too. At least I have better things to do than flame college students on SlashDot. In fact, I spend no more than two hours a week on TopCoder, often less. I almost never practice, and I have not competed very many times.
"someone who won top coder is saying it's a good indication of real world ability"
I believe I said that it is not completely irrelevant. That would be different. Since I did this interview for some internet thing that neither I nor my friends read, and since I am not even looking for a job right now, I didn't really have a vested interest.
"(tenured math professor = job security)"
"he's smart enough to know even he can't get a job programming"
If you guys think it is easier to get and maintain a good programming job than it is to get and maintain a math professorship at, say, Harvard, you are very much mistaken.
"So this guy is telling us he makes this for the money and he will become a math professor?"
I believe I mentioned that money is no longer my primary reason for doing TopCoder. Furthermore, just because I choose to spend minimal time making lots of money given the opportunity, does not mean I can't live with a bad-paying job.
"normally you do not *decide* to become a professor"
Really? I actually think this is precisely what happens.
"other serious, more difficult, competitions like the ACM"
You don't know what you're talking about. Everybody in the TopCoder top 10 has done extremely well on some or all of the ACM, the IOI, the Putnam, and the IMO. Of these contests, I'd say the ACM is actually the most worthless (straightforward problems, missing constraints, ridiculous 3-person 1-computer dynamic, ridiculous 2-year limit).
"Mr. TopCoder could very easily be a pro athlete. He sure answers questions like one."
What do you want me to say? Maybe I should have answered questions like "Have you thought about how you want to apply your computer skills after graduation?" with "Actually, since I'm a super-genius, I thought I would show P != NP, and then maybe move on to the Riemann hypothesis, and then maybe I'd see if I could fly just by thinking really hard, like that dude in the Matrix". Certain questions will get lame answers every time.
To those of you who aren't asses, good day.
-- David Arthur