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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. :(
So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.
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.
...all from outside the U.S.?
Our education system is in serious trouble.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
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.
You are correct. The four winners used C++.
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
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
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 think we're seeing the results of having a large C64 and then Amiga demo scene.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
Besides his calculator endeavors jimmy's also a known fast typer :)
#23 all time on typerA.
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
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.
Holy crap are you confused.
Topcoder runs tournaments (mostly to attract good coders in the first place) and then there's a separate page for component development. If you do the component development, you get paid. That's the stuff they sell to companies. The "component competition" you linked to is where they're throwing an extra bonus on top of the pay you get for a component, to encourage more people to do it.
But most people do the tournaments, because they're much more fun. There was a time when TopCoder was only tournaments; basically, they gave out lots of money and hardly made any. That, of course, had to stop, so now they have the components section too.
It should be clear why they have to have extra incentives like the component competition: writing useful, non-specialized code that companies would want to buy is boring as all hell. So most TopCoders don't participate in that part of the site, even though the pay is good.
The problems that are asked for the coding tournaments, like Google's, have all been solved before (that's how they have a reference solution to compare your outputs to!) That's not the code they sell. These problems are purely for fun. Look at the medium-level problem from the championship: given a polynomial, find the largest root. This is not cutting edge code that a company will pay for. Your TI calculator can do that. However, writing the code to do it, from scratch, in less than an hour, is quite an interesting challenge.
And if you consider yourself a geek, but can't fathom the idea of people writing code for fun... be very embarrassed.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
BS. The competitions give you a higher TopCoder ranking. Then every once in a while, TopCoder sends out an email basically recruiting its users to code projects. In fact I found an email they sent to me, here it is (formatted to avoid the lameness filter):
e x
LEVEL 3 COMPONENT AVAILABLE FOR DESIGN!
Note that there is a special component available for design this week. TopCoder is working with Sun to help provide the telecommunications industry with an entire set of APIs for integration with their business critical systems. The first step is to build a component for generating Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs). Check out the details of the OSS/J TCK Test Proxy component and contact Bill Blais (bblais@topcoder.com) if you have any questions.
The following design projects are now available:
Component Name/Catalog/Price/Deadline
Generic Parser/.NET/$252.00/11.12.2003
Lightweight Model View Controller/.NET/$402.00/11.12.2003
MSMQ Remoting Channel/.NET/$168.00/11.12.2003
Phonetic Pattern Matching/.NET/$336.00/11.12.2003
Spell Check/.NET/$336.00/11.12.2003
Data Set/Java/$201.00/11.12.2003
Financial Ledger/Java/$168.00/11.12.2003
OSS/J TCK Test Proxy/Java/$1,000.00/11.19.2003
For more information about TopCoder development opportunities go to:
http://www.topcoder.com/?t=development&c=ind
So there it is. Yes they do recruit for big companies. BUT it's for money, pretty decent money too. The problems you do in competitions are mostly academic in nature, but they use the scores to decide who to pick for the pay gigs.
Also you say, you can do the same thing at your normal job. Well, did you ever think that some people don't HAVE jobs, and this might help them making money until they find one?
Next time you trash a company that is actually trying to do something good for the programmer community, try doing some reading first...
Mark
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.
You're a bit misinformed.
I did the TopCoder contests for a while a year or two ago (back when they gave cash prizes.) There's the "Single Round Matches", which are what most of us would recognize as typical "coding competitions", and then they have some "component design" contests, or rather have an ongoing list of software components (for example, an FTP module or a module that accesses a database) that they wish to have developed and contract out to rated TopCoder members, including design/implementation.
The little components are the software they're apparently selling, but the coding competitions (like this Code Jam) don't generate any saleable technology/IP. Competitors in the coding contests are therefore not being scammed, and those involved in developing the components do so voluntarily (and are compensated, although not compensated that much.)
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
You are mixing up topcoder.com -- programming competitions -- with software.topcoder.com -- design/development competitions.
The results of the programming competition are ugly; no one would want to use it anyway.
The component design/development competitions have a software engineering process around them and take several weeks. Winners are paid for their work, and everyone knows that this is being marketed -- in fact their is a provision for royalties.