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Google Code Jam Winner Announced
Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual
Code Jam programming contest.
Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada),
third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia),
fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland).
Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."
Google is a great company founded by a bunch of academic aristocrats that will not consider employees that we not good students from good schools (Ph.D. at Stanford is par for the course). I bet if they looked at the results of their challenge they would se SEVERAL people who did very well with little or no academic training.
Meritocracy is the way to determine who knows their stuff and academic merit does not hold up well to real world merit in my experience. Of the best coders I have ever met many are college dropouts and others did their college in totally different subjects (chemistry, physics, music).
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----- Refactoring is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.
What is your TopCoder handle? Clearly you are another clueless droid that thinks he knows what TopCoder is all about. I've learned a lot from the solutions that many of the top TopCoders have put forth to earn them their ratings. Brute force will only get you so far. But some of the best solutions are inspired and you can learn a lot from them. Before you start spewing garbage like this, I'd like to see how you would solve some of the problems in the arena.
-- router
NASCAR requires you to drive as fast as you can without regard to safety of others and has no relevance to real world driving situations. Therefore I would never be a NASCAR driver.
Stupid argument. Draw your own conclusions.
-- router