Internet Problem Solving Contest 2004

misof writes "The sixth year of the annual Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) will take place on Friday May 21st. IPSC is one of world's largest online programming contests with over 600 teams from more than 50 countries participating last year. The main purpose of IPSC is to compare problem solving skills of people from around the world and, of course, to have fun. IPSC is not oriented on a specific programming language instead you are given the input data and may produce the output data by any means. (This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!) The contest is open for everybody and we invite you to participate!"

Comments

All the smartest people...

[Plaeroma]

...in the world still can't fix the problem of stupid user syndrome.

T-Shirt?

[fore1337]

Can't I just get a T-Shirt, and *SAY* I participated?

convergant or divergent solutions

[Engineer Andy]

I would be interested in seeing the extent to which people with similar training come up with similar solutions based on using the standard toolkit they are accustomed to hauling out for any problem. The other outcome would be of people are sparked into thinking outside the box by the competition not being tied to the "this is the way the company does this sort of thing and so you shall follow this methodology".

Thinking in my own field of engineering, if you gave people problems to solve outside of the work environment you would probably get a far more creative set of solutions than you would if people were set the same problem at work in the context of a project.

Re:convergant or divergent solutions

[The_reformant]

I dont really think this has anything to do with the sort of training you receive in the workplace. These are abstract problems which are a prime candidate for testing an applicants knowledge of fundamental algorithms and how to select the best datastructure for the job.

Looking at the sample set of problems the tiling problem and the dependancy problem should be able to be solved optimally (in terms of time complexity) fairly easily since they are both simplifications of well known problems in CS.

The smiley face problem is quite interesting and i agree that this one could expose some really good creatinve thinking.

All in all based on the sample problems I think this competition would be ideally suited to strong computer science students or recent graduates. Most people in the work place have totally forgotten all of the necesary kind of skills since in the real world they don't work quite so well

To be honest it makes a change to have a situation that favours students over those with experience in the industry. Slashdot all too often slams graduates fresh out of uni simply because they make mistakes due to lack of experience in the field.

suck rules

[poincare]

From http://ipsc.ksp.sk/rules.php

Each team may use only one computer or one terminal (one keyboard and one monitor).
You can't have a distributed team working through the internet.

It is forbidden to use systems for symbolic computation (e.g. Mathematica, Maple, Matlab) and special libraries (e.g. LEDA).
Most of the programming languages listed (Pascal, C, C++, Java, Basic, Smalltalk, Lisp, Logo, Perl, Python) have symbolic libraries, but it looks like you can't use those and'll have to reinvent those wheels. Hmmmm.

SUperior programming language

[pdxdada]

This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!

All the hours of practice, the computer science degrees, all the long dateless Friday nights coding, I now know they have led up to this contest. Why I can program anything, except for this emotion you call "love."

Glaven

[lewko]

This could actually be THE way to show your friends the superiority of both your skills and your favourite programming environment!

Friends?

Change of plans, guys...

[shigelojoe]

The competition has been outsourced to India.