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."

Comments

Anyone know...

[bennomatic]

what the problems were?

Re:Anyone know...

[sulli]

Not enough coders willing to work for free or cheap at Google?

Re:Anyone know...

[TheIzzy]

Check out www.topcoder.com. They have a list of all the previous problems, and you can even see all the competitors' solutions if you want.

Re:Anyone know...

[jareds]

The easy problem was, given a topographic map (as an array of strings of the same length, with 'A' to 'Z' giving the heights), a point on the map, and a cardinal direction, return the farthest point visible in that direction from that point.

The medium problem was, given an array of integers representing the coefficients of a polynomial, return the largest root. Note that this is harder than it sounds because it's difficult to solve correctly just using Newton's method.

The hard problem was, given an integer n and a fixed, precisely defined set of keystrokes available in a hypothetical editor, return the minimum number of keystrokes required to produce exactly n copies of the same character. This required an efficient search and correct choice of state space.

A sad realization of self

[roninmagus]

It's a sad thing--if I'd won the money, I'd have just bought more computers. :(

What did they write?

[penguinboy]

So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.

Google - Champion of the Common Man

[Pavan_Gupta]

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.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

[XorNand]

Your two aforementioned companies are both publicly owned. They are legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders. The actual owners of the company are not involved in the daily management and have only one, single-minded reason for owning stock: profit.

When Google finally bites the bullet and has a billion dollars in other people's money, a old-school board of directors, along with the need to please the SEC and Wall Street analysts, things will change drastically. You'll suddenly see Google become much more conservative because they have so many interests to look out for and competing voices to listen to.

Then some other upstart, agile company will usurp the crown and be the geek's new flavor-of-the-week. It's just how capitalism works. The moral: Don't get to blindly attacted to Google or you're going to feel deeply betrayed--they *are* only a business after all.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

[MisterFancypants]

Google is smart, not "Good". If you think they are really the champions of the common man, consider the fact that they actively help the Chinese government censor most of the net for its citizens.

I use google all the time, because they know what I want, not because they are some sort of do-gooders... Because they aren't.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

[Elwood P Dowd]

As your other respondent sortof points out, the primary complaints on google watch relate to people in the "search optimization industry."

These are people that want their websites to get higher rankings on Google searches. It actually has nothing whatsoever to do with poor behavior on Google's part.

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

[XorNand]

Why is this a warning sign? Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, the odds were not very good that an American would be among the winners. Stop being so narrow-minded, there are bright people from all over the world--America and abroad.

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

[Izeickl]

Check out Country Ratings

US comes 13th out of the 16 ranked countries. Funnily enough, for all the outsourcing it gets, India is last.

my school career belongs to Jimmy Mardell

[weetjerm]

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.

if it isn't jimmy mardell!

[sm.arson]

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.

Yay Jimmy!

[YodaToad]

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

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

[ponxx]

then again, Sweden only has a population of ~9M. If you scale this to the population of the US (300M) then you get 24*300/9=800.

Admittedly that's still only half as many entrants/population as the US, but the disparity is not as huge as you suggest...

Ponxx

Re:Bullshit

[monkeyfinger]

Last time I checked, Google was an AMERICAN company. You think that they would have the decency or the patriotism to give at least one award to an AMERICAN. Sorry Google but you are no longer my search engine of choice. Altavista here I come.

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?

Re:Anyone notice that 95% of earth's population...

[yomegaman]

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.

The problem with TopCoder

[spectecjr]

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.

Re:The problem with TopCoder

[spectecjr]

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

Note that when you win NASCAR, the trophy you get isn't for "Safest Commuter Driver" either. TopCoder, however, supposedly ranks developers according to their talent and ability. This is not, however, what they are doing. They're ranking them by their ability to come up with quick hacky solutions - not real software engineering.

jimmy mardell's other achievements

[p4r4d0x]

Besides his calculator endeavors jimmy's also a known fast typer :)

#23 all time on typerA.

Re:Now THERE'S a Polish Joke for you!

[MSBob]

Poland's math and computing education is modelled on the soviet degrees just like in the rest of the Eastern Europe and are much tougher than anything in the West. Course notes are essentially like reading Knuth's TAOCP. I think only MIT could give Eastern European Universities a run for its money.

They don't have many universities (for the size of the population) but they provide some of the toughest, highest quality courses in math, engineering and Computer Science.

I spent only three years in a Polish high school (they normally last four or five years) and went straight to a third year of a top British University in their Electrical Engineering programme. All of the math required was covered in the first couple of years in my high school.