Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ACM Collegiate Programming Contest Winner Announced

Posted by simoniker on from the clever-people dept.

Slob Nerd writes "The finals for this years ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals have just finished. And the winner is... St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics! Full results here, and details on all teams here. A pdf of the problems is also available. Congrats to all involved."

12 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Depressing by gowen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is the appeal of turning everything into a competitive event? Whether its music, literature or programming, someone somewhere is trying to convert a self-contained creative process into a "Nyah, nyah, my college/school/town I'm better than deal."

    What happened to the satisfaction of doing something for its own sake?

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:Depressing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Ego, Pride, etc. Its a natural human trait that we should take advantage of. And it's not this is not a SINFUL human characteristic like the church and modern american society would like you to believe.

    2. Re:Depressing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not like you HAVE to program in this compitition.

      If you want to program, you program for it's own sake.

      Some people actually LIKE competition. They like piting their skills against a advisary. IT'S FUN.

      People sponsor events like this because it gets people public attention. It allows you to identify good programming practices vs bad ones, good programmer's vs bad programmers, good programs vs bad programs.

      People can take this experiance and IMPROVE themselves, they can see were they F*ck'd up and fix it, they can see were they did well and improve on it.

      It allows the winners notoriaty. As a winner you get benifits like having your name advertised, getting a trophy, and you get to point out that for this event you were the best or part of the best programming team around.

      Why would you NOT want to compete? What is wrong with competition?

      IT'S FUN.
      It inspires creativity, hard work, and advancements in technology.
      It gives the winners rewards and it's a learning experiance for the losers so they can improve themselves.

      Why do you find that so depressing?

      It's a win-win situation for anybody and everybody involved that has a good attitude.

    3. Re:Depressing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Competition isn't nessecarily the best place to show off one's skills. You have an artificial work environment, immense pressure, highly restrictive rules, and hardly any time. This tends to lead to lower quality work, not higher.

      I imagine Russia's team spent a lot more of their time practicing for this situation than everyone else did.

      Someone else pointed out how Mathematics are given much more respect in Russia than they are in America's school system. That is certianly true as well..

    4. Re:Depressing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
      >like the church and modern american society

      You don't need to repeat yourself...

    5. Re:Depressing by gowen · · Score: 2, Insightful
      IT'S FUN.
      Sure it is, just look at the fun DunbarTheInept had. Does the fact he's still bitter months later strike you as evidence that he had positive, fun experience?
      It inspires creativity,
      Insanely tight deadlines do not inspire creativity. Anyone who's had to produce robust codes knows that "Do it now" and "do it right" are mortal enemies.
      and advancements in technology.
      Tell me, what technology couldd possible be advanced by bunch of students solving some already-solved problems in an extreme hurry?
      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  2. Re:Congrats to the winners, and bitter memories by smiths2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You say the people who "got sloppy" got the problem correct right away. I think a better description would be they put in some tolerance for errors. I would assume you bothered to check your program against the maximum input (to check for time factors).

    You also forgot to mention that the three or four team members get to SHARE one computer. So, it's not only important to be able to solve problems quickly, it's also about managing the limited resources at your disposal.

  3. Re:Congratulations to the Russians by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    It's also interesting to note that two guys of the MIT's team (which was the best US team) are actually Romanians nationals:

    Octavian-Daniel Dumitran (*)

    Reid Barton

    Victor Costan (*)

  4. Re:Too bad, but why are you dissing everyone else? by sydneyfong · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why do you assume that everyone else was "sloppy" and just allocated a big array? If you're going to write a big-int routine it's not that much more difficult to write an arbitrary precision routine than it is to write a "max FOO" precision routine.

    In these competition environments with severe time constraints, nobody would write an arbitrary precision routine when an upper limit of FOO is given. Some people do, however, set their "MAX" constant to something much larger than the given, but it is normally assumed that the given "FOO" is correct and the increased "MAX" constant is only to cater for some possible off-by-one or minor overflow errors instead of a problem of the input. After all, not everybody wants to calculate how much space to exactly allocate when some BIGNUM would seem to suffice. *That's* what the grandparent means regarding "sloppy coding".

    --
    Don't quote me on this.
  5. Error checking. by some+guy+I+know · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Try (print (fact -1)).
    Or (print (fact 1.5)).
    Or (print (fact "Hi, Mom!")).

    In a dynamically-typed language like LISP, it is important to check that the argument(s) is(are) of the right type, as well as within the proper range(s).
    So you should add a check to make sure that the arg to fact is a positive integer.
    To avoid doing this check every time that the function recurses, fact should do the check, then hand off the calc to a helper function, say, unchecked-fact, that is defined similar to the way that you originally defined fact.

    --
    Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
  6. Re:Why this is hard by Bull999999 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've been to ACM programming contest myself and pretty much agree with the parent. The sad part was that there where more slots open then participents in my school and I had to actively recruit some of the teammates.

    The contest I competed in had IBM as its sponsor, and there was a rep there collecting resumes. There was another regional non-regional that I've competed in sponsored by Sun Microsystems and they where collecting resumes there as well.

    I believe that, aside from the challenge, these contests are great way to network with employers, and in a tough job market, every bit counts.

    --
    1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
  7. Re:Non-PC Question Here... by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, Americans always have this arrogance that we're the best in the world. Truth is, as far as technical schools go, there are some in Russia, Taiwan and India that churn out many more really, truly smart and excellent programmers than even the best schools in the US. But of course, because their English is not so good, they must be stupid. Nevermind the fact that they've been doing calculus since they were probably 14. That gets you labeled a "child prodigy" here. Go figure.