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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."
what the problems were?
The CB App. What's your 20?
It's a sad thing--if I'd won the money, I'd have just bought more computers. :(
But I couldn't find what the hell the contest was. What it involved, what the people had to do. Would anyone care to enlighten me?
So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.
It would be interesting to know what language they used. From the rules :
Use Java, C++, C# or VB.NET. Pick any of these programming languages to code your solutions. All are acceptable and none is given an advantage.
My bet : C++
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I don't comment very often, but I always get a little tingly feeling thinking about how Google is one of the very few companies I see in the wide expanse of capitalism that seems to actually enjoy making their customers feel good about the fact that they are giving a little out of their own pocket/time. I would pay to use google, just becase google is not an angry behemoth like Microsoft, Walmart, or Big Bro.
Congrats to the guys who won, and a special congratulation to Google for being my favorite company on planet earth.
fucking xenophobe....
you run a company where you don't hire certain people b/c of arbitrary charecteristics and see how well you do.... I want to be your competitor so I can crush with w/ my diverse team of superior intellect and ability because I draw from a larger pool of talent instead of your artifically limited one....
...all from outside the U.S.?
Our education system is in serious trouble.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
5000 coders, 10,000 dollars prize... hmmmm
;)
Actually it would be $19,750 as second, third and fourth places get cash prizes too
4996 of these people wont even get any accolades for their work that the company may end up using. But thats the way it is with these type of contests.
Join the TWIT army now!
I gues we in the US can no longer complain that the jobs for coders are leaving the country.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
is outside the U.S.?
Ok, many of those people haven't had much experience with computers. But even if you just look at the US, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU, you've still got easily enough people to make the lack of US success attributable to chance.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
This guy is no stranger to programming. Many a day in middle school, and high school, was spent playing games Jimmy made for the TI-85 and TI-92. Specifically, he programmed Boulderdash, Tetris, Solitare, and many more to the various calculator platforms. A comprehensive list can be found at ticalc.org. Thanks man! Sqrxz was great.
The Google Code Jam winner was certainly famous for his skills a long time before this... even ordinary kids in my suburban high school new about Jimmy Mardell 8 years ago.
Jimmy Mardell was one of the pioneers of assembly programming for the TI calculators way back when. Without his ZTetris program (with two player link capability, no less!), high school math class would have been really boring for me.
I credit Jimmy Mardell's work for sparking my interest in game programming. It's good to see he's still on top of things.
for great justice, this sig has been moved
Er, it must be nice to be able to dismiss it like that, but as was previously mentioned: If you look at topcoders country ratings, usa is near the bottom of the ranked countries. Just under canada there. The top countries are Sweeden, Poland, and Germany, in that order. The link to that page is in the comment above yours, take a look.
:)
If it were the olympics you wouldn't say 'ahh, there are so many countries, USA is bound to lose most of the time.' Thats downright unpatriotic of you
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I just want to take the time to congratulate Jimmy on a job well done. I knew someone from the "TI Community" would make it big some day.
I'm sure everyone who's ever owned a recent TI graphing calculator (TI-83 and up) will remember zTetris, among other puzzle games, that Jimmy wrote.
Jimmy Mardell
"But even if you just look at the US, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU, you've still got easily enough people to make the lack of US success attributable to chance."
True. I guess I am adding this to a larger body of observations on my part. I just don't think our system is keeping up. The number of people I meet from other much smaller countries that have really strong computer skills seems disproportionate. This could just be a perspective issue though. My comments aren't based on anything scientific - it just seems like it's the case to me.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
It seems that the Scandinavians/NE Europeans are very talented with all parts of computing, such as programming and gaming. If i'm not mistaken, the Counter Strike clan that won the latest CPL were Swedish. I see a lot of good quality mappers that are from this part of the world, 3D-Mike and this guy for example. Oh, let's not forget Linus Torvalds. I hear that the broadband infrastructure is excellent in those parts of Europe and I suppose that will do anything but harm the situation.
/.'ers like to comment?
Would any Eastern European
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Finals results
Google CodeJam
Onsite Championship Round
Handle Score
Yarin 569.58
ChristopherH 482.17
venco 359.85
tomek 331.87
Topcoders ranking:
Top 10 Coders
Rank Handle Rating
1. tomek 3450
2. SnapDragon 3285
3. reid 3169
4. snewman 3132
5. Yarin 3058
6. NGBronson 3005
7. bladerunner 2928
8. John Dethridge 2912
9. ZorbaTHut 2881
10. WishingBone 2858
Poland Rules!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I wish topcoder would let people write in Common Lisp or something more fun than Java, C++, and fucking C#. Since any problem solved is just going to have to be rewritten anyway when it is implemented in the real world (or on google.com), you'd think they'd allow people more freedom than OO styles. I mean, Lisp can do OO, too!
How about, "Rack yourself against 5,000 of the world's best programmers for a 1/5000 chance at $10,000 and an outside shot at a job offer. Salary is negotiable and depends on experience."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Turns out the Europeans can beat the best of Silicon Valley.
Well, first of all, I don't agree with that. It kind of assumes that the best of Silicon Valley were attending that contest instead of actually trying to make a go of their company!
Secondly, however, I think it might point to a weakness in our current US culture. Nearly every young person that I talk to now (I am 50, by the way), when talking about majors in college, puts any kind of technical degree at the bottom of the list. In fact, of the few that did express an interest in a technical degree, it was always with the assumption that a business degree would soon follow (direct quote from one: "Electrical Engineering with a Master's in Business Administration").
And why not? The big rewards now all go to CEO's, CFO's and a lot of other CxO's that don't really create anything, they just manage it. Aside from a few entrepreneurs who started their own technical businesses (and, no, Bill Gates does not count, I've seen the code that he "created" in the early days of his career; he's better off managing!), there are few high-profile creative technical people in the US right now. Rightly or wrongly, a helluva lot of the credit (and, lately, a lot of the blame) goes to the managers of companies, not the people who sweat blood creating products that make companies what they are today.
Unless things change radically in the next few years, I would guess we'll see a lot more of this.
You're assuming that the contestants were knowingly doing it for the money and not just for the hell of it, or the challenge. Besides the top placers will probably get a job out of it, if they don't have one already.
Some fun string manipulation stuff... can't recall the problem I completed in the qualification round(I managed to declare a few varialbes on the second problem I had to do then my time ran out) but it was a lot of fun and definitely educational. I never used typedefs before then... use them all the time. never used stringstreams either. Now I do...
Placed something like 160 in my group... only the top 100 advanced:(
The country ratings are not meaningful because the competitors are not randomly selected from each country. There are fewer competitors from Europe, and those that do compete are quite good, whereas there are many amateur competitors from the U.S.
This is based on reality and my personal knowledge -- not what is on their website. PhD in CS for a damn INTERNSHIP! http://www.google.com/jobs/internship.html
----- Refactoring is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.
Decency? This was a competion and the best men won, what's indecent about that?
Patriotism? If google ran a crooked competition where an american got a prize they didn't earn would that make you proud? Wouldn't it be better to keep trying until you win fair and square and then take pride in that?
Link to child porn.
actually, $24750, as 5-25th place all got $250.
This was not the same format as last year's Google Code Jam. This was a algorithmic problem solving contest where competitors given the same set of problems try to solve more problems faster than the others under a short time frame. Google could in no way benefit from the competiors' solutions because they already had solutions for testing purposes. RTFA for the exact format of the contest.
www.topcoder.com is where the contest details are and the solutions etc. I suggest you join I've won $2000 so far although I'm an uber programmer so that's to be expected.
Most people who participate in such contests don't do it for the money, but because the problem is interesting or just for the fun. I belive that most good software was written by programmers who were really into the concept, not into the money which could be made out of it. So there is nothing worthless about this, except for your comment. Remember: Nobody was forced to take part in this contest.
It seem to me that you are lacking any insight into hackerdom and geek culture and how good programmers and hackers think and work. If you are really and associate professor in computer science, your comment makes me sick. But i don't believe that a person who was moderated so often as troll like you that he got a starting score of zero is really a professor.
When I was in grad school for physics it was sort of a running joke that the incoming Chinese students would always destroy the American ones on the qualifying exam. Finally I asked one of the Chinese guys about it and he told me that he had to beat out hundreds of people in China on a battery of tests just to even apply to an American grad school. We only get a chance to meet the best of the best, the rest of them are still in China.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
Considering only 24 people are ranked for Sweden and over 1300 for the US, it's not surprising we're ranked lower. We've got a lot more people trying (and failing) which lowers the overall score.
It'd be interesting to see how our top X compare to another country's top X or just who has the top coder over all.
The statistics as they are, are pretty much meaningless.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The link in the parent "office Google pages" is not google. It's a porn site
--BigDave--
The people who are competing for prizes are, AFAICT, donating their labor to solve real problems for real companies. Take a look at the set of current "competitions" here
Or, how about this quote (trying to lure "customers", ahem... Donations for competitions):
or, this one:
So, do you want to work for free, for a chance to win less than you would have made in your job to do the same thing? All for the opportunity to get listed as a good coder on a site that exploits you?
If so, be embarrassed... Be very embarrassed.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Google - Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages:
Google Search: Altavista
First site returned:
Hmm..... returns the 'competitor' - commies?
Or worse - liberals!
;~0
Altavista searching worldwide: Google
First site returned:
Serves business first - you're right - very American.
Subduction leads to orogeny
One-hundred hours of my time is worth about $7,000 (100 hours * 70 dollars per hour salary).
Just to clue you in to a little known fact:
The vast majority of people in developed countries make nowhere near $70 an hour.
I'd venture that a lot of the people going in for something like that probably make more in the $10-20 range.
$10,000 is a hell of a lot of money for someone just starting out, or not making $140,000 a year like yourself.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Christropher, a graduate of University of Waterloo, shows how much talent Canada and Waterloo has within.. I hope i get into Waterloo too :)
Sorry to the americans that *aren't* like that - as with most things, the few spoil it for everyone.
The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.
Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
True, but they are still under martial law. If the intent of the US government is to give them democracy, then let's compare how they feel about democracy after they actually have it to how they felt about Mr Hussein (why are we on a first name basis anyways?).
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Besides his calculator endeavors jimmy's also a known fast typer :)
#23 all time on typerA.
A) It says MS and PhD candidates,
B) It doesn't say how much they pay,
Most companies use internship programs to check out potential talent before hiring them full-time. If the type of work/talent that Google has in mind requires someone with graduate-level experience, it makes sense for them to gear their internship program at that level doesn't it?
So, it's quite possible their pay scale is at least as good as what you would get working as an RA or TA for a university, with equally or more interesting work. Sure they could be trolling for top talent at cheap prices, but what grad student is going to go for that? Perhaps Google is just trying different ways of attracting and filtering out top talent, methods that don't involve stupid logic problems in a 1 hour HR interview.
As the great-grandparent post says, there certainly are mounds of good coders without that graduate-level education but the contest leaves an opening for filtering those out. While those coders may be good at programming, they are less likely to have the mathematical background for analysis and algorithm development that Google wants.
king ramen seems to know a lot about google personel profiles so perhaps he has an axe to grind.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The American thing to do is pick the best man (or woman) for the job, regardless of their national origin. That is what makes this country great.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Odds are, they're more likely to use the work of the top 4. They may cull a few interesting ideas from the lower ranks, but I doubt they'll choose to implement the 4983rd most efficient solution they have when there are 4982 that are better. You have to look at it properly: they aren't getting 5000 people to work for them for free, they are paying $20,000 to get the top 4 to submit their best solutions. I suspect they don't give a crap about the rest.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
For Sweden, I think the reason is spelled Ericsson.
Why?
Take a look at these reasons:
Oki, there are a few other things as well, that does help Ericsson quite a bit:
That's not patriotism your talking about, that's nationalism.
That's why the retirement age has to be increased from 65 to 79 by the time we're about to retire...
Wrong. It's not a creative contest -- all competitors are given the same contest problems (check out TopCoder's site) which are reasonably small (most of the seasoned experts can sling through the set of 3 problems in an hour/hour and a half or so) and usually need to be solved with efficient algorithms (knowledge of graph theory, efficient search techniques, dynamic programming, etc. helps.) They have nothing to do with Google's product or technology.
Nice troll though.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.
I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.
Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.
Waking Life and lucid dreaming are the dog's bollox.
Dartmouth just fell off my list of colleges to apply to. Thanks for helping me not waste my time applying and possibly making the mistake of actually going there.
Judging by your English, I'm going to guess that you are not one of those academic aristocrats?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What are you supposed to do when it is cold outside 24/7 and your country is developed enough so that everyone can afford a computer?
:)
btw, I realize this is not a valid reason. Bulgaria is poor and has nice beaches, but it still ranks #9 in the topcoder ranking.
One-hundred hours of my time is worth about $7,000 (100 hours * 70 dollars per hour salary).
Using your reasoning, your post to slashdot just cost you $6.
applicants spent at least a hundred hours of their own time
;)
What? I spent, all told, about 3-4 hrs. I got eliminated in the second round, so I did the qualification round (2 problems, 1 hour), the first round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs), and the second round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs). Factor in a little chatting time before and after rounds.
The thing was meant to be a competition, which means you know you're going in with only slight chance of winning anything. I went in for the fun of competing with peers. Note that the problem solutions aren't being harvested and used in Google, the problems aren't like that. It was just a competition.
By the way, it was totally worth it. I won a t-shirt.
Remove "over." If Google is God, then you welcome our new search engine Lord.
How does feeding a -1 troll get modded up to 4?
It manage to show some insight when replying to it? Just because you answer to something stupid doesn't mean you're going to say something stupid.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Using your reasoning, your post to slashdot just cost you $6.
I can see why he did not have time to read the article.
Well, so far it's worked America in the Olympics, war, and democracy
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
EVERY corporation, public or private, is "legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders." The point is that they have shareholders, hence the responsibility
Not true. There are corporations that exist with not-for-profit/public interest/charitable purposes. Some of them are legally bound to prevent their shareholders having any financial interest in them. Needless to say, investment is not one of the reasons for being a shareholder in such a corporation.
Perhaps my comment was hasty, but I am a veteran coder from the valley, and I'll tell you what: $252 for a parser? $336 for a Phonetic pattern matcher? My rates were $150+ / hour... From my POV, this is exploitation...
If these rates are cool for you, more power to you. Sorry for getting down on something you like.
In fact, if this is something that you guys enjoy, then my apologies. But I watched systematic exploitation of talent for over a decade, where those being exploited were making MUCH MORE than these little numbers. I just have a soft spot for talent and real trigger for those that take advantage.
BTW: These projects that are listed, how do you claim the money? If you volunteer, are you guaranteed to cash in when you turn in your work? Or are you taking a chance that someone else will also turn in the work and get paid instead?
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Ph.D. at Stanford is par for the course
Ph.D. which founder Larry Page never got...
That reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw last week:
One simple rule for its versus it's
Uhh, what you're saying makes absolutly no sense.
..let me get this straight.. Since there are fewer competitors from europe..the ones that compete are better..but since more people from the USA compete, they are more amateurs?
You are saying that the country ratings mean nothing because
I propose that they ARE essentially randomly selected. Whoever wants to compete, competes. All the competitors averaged out from a country is a country ranking. Since its an average, obviously the country rankings mean just what they show. The average ranking of that country compared to other countries.
Buuuut, if it makes you feel better, have fun rationalizing.
(BTW, im from canada which is only a spot above the usa, but you dont see me justifying it wiht BS stats examples)
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Better check again, Sparky. The U.S. isn't Sweden, yet, but programs like Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, etc. are all socialist in nature in that they compel people who create wealth to support those who don't. We as a country should care for and help people who need it, but in a non-Socialist country such activity would be done voluntarily by individuals and corporations, not by force of law. The U.S. is a socialist country, and you have Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt to thank for it.
I obviously didn't explain in enough detail, but I'm right.
As you note, the samples are self-selected, not randomly selected. While self-selected samples can roughly substitute for random samples in some circumstances, this is not one of them. The fact that the huge number of competitors from the US is more than can be accounted for by population differences is a tip-off that self-selection has skewed the samples. There must be a reason why people from the US are more likely to compete, and this reason might affect the skill distribution of the competitors. In fact, it does. The main reason is that matches are not at convenient times in Europe compared to the US. Also, the problem statements are written in standard American English, which also makes it more convenient to compete in the US. Because competing is more convenient for Americans than Europeans, fewer Europeans find it worth their while to compete. Those that are likely to do well are more likely to find it worth their while.
Really, though, if you think a self-selected sample will work, the burden of proof is on you to argue why.
Note that I do actually believe that the educational system in the US is inferior to that in Europe. However, I still believe that those statistics are meaningless, because I understand statistics.
Buuuut, if it makes you feel better, have fun rationalizing.
Pfft. My rating on TopCoder is much higher than the average for Sweden. I'm not arguing that the country rankings are meaningless to inflate my precious ego.
IMHO, this is the only way for Google to stay true to Brin's maxim, "Don't Be Evil."
:) They (a) make great burgers, (b) have the highest wages in the fast food industry and as a result have the highest customer/employee satisfaction ratings.
For motivation, look at fast food industry. Ever since the 50's it's been one giant rat race of who's going to sell more burgers. It's led to the dominance of giant corporations, who now have a huge market share, sleazy business practices, and have created really shitty labor conditions for millions of workers to boot. The only "non-evil" fast food joint is In-N-Out (if you live in CA you know what I'm talkin' about
What's the point here? Well, In-N-Out is privately held, and have resisted multiple pressures to go public. Hence, no insentive to increase margins by depressing wages, to follow the latest trends in the industry by offering the Fast Food Fashion of the Season (be it bagelwiches, salads, tacos, etc)... They just make really good burgers.
So far, Google has done just that: focused on what its original purpose was -- to be a kick-ass search engine -- and done it remarkably well. But I doubt that after the IPO things will not change for the worse and we will have another Microsoft on our hands... Or McDonald's.
about meaningless contests. Many of the best programmers (here and abroad) are out doing something besides entering meaningless contests. Hardly an indictment of our educational system.
Google Watch Watch
Google Watch is an extremely unbalanced site, and there are several direct lies. As has been pointed out, it is put up because Mr. Brandt didn't like his pagerank and thought that his obscure site about Rumsfeld should have ranked higher. But Google didn't rank it higher, so he set out on a personal vendetta. I have written about this before, so I am not going to repeat everything here.
But again, this is my plea to the mods that they consider the facts at hand and spend their mod points wisely. It is well and good to keep an eye on large corporations, but spreading lies about them is unacceptable. Especially when Google is actually a very useful tool and does not seem to be "evil" just yet ;)
Clever signature text goes here.
Altavista searching worldwide: Google
The Hoover result is actually a sponsored link. But your mistake, which I shared for at least a few seconds, shows that the real problem is the absence of visual contrast between the sponsored and (I hope) unsponsored results, just a couple of small-ish text fields.
Therte's a line between using minimalism to aid clarity, as Google do, and using it to obscure matters, and I think Altavista are nudging it.