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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."
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.
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.
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.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Check out Country Ratings
US comes 13th out of the 16 ranked countries. Funnily enough, for all the outsourcing it gets, India is last.
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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
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
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.
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
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?
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