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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."
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"
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
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.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
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.
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?
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.