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Geek Olympics Code for Gold
Haydn Fenton writes "Wired has a recent article on the16th annual IOI (that's International Olympiad in Informatics), taking place in Athens from Sept 11th to Sept 18th. The 304 programmers from 80 countries will be competing in 7 marathon programming sessions to determine the world's fastest coder. The computers are being supplied by Altec and contestants will have a choice of using either Windows XP or RedHat 9.0. More information can be found on the IOI Website."
Just don't make them play beach volleyball..
*shudder*
Do the female Geeks get to wear those hot outfits like the Olympic Vollyball teams???
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
How sweet would it be to have cheerleaders for this kind of thing?
A programming contest that doesn't include MacOS X? Crazy! All of the best engineers I know have been moving to MacOS X as their native platform ever since MacOS X 10.2. It lets you use all those wonderful open source tools, and still have a nice friendly GUI, and work on a beautiful laptop, all at once. It's a thing of beauty.
And Apple's development tools rock!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
With a newer distro, the contestants would get newer versions of the tools (like Eclipse, Emacs, etc.).
I'm not criticizing; I'm just wondering.
-- I like my women like I like my beer: smooth, and not too gassy.
Personally, I think fast code is more important than coding fast. But that's because I work in the real-time media industry..
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
the paraolympics are opening on 17th.
in athens.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What could be better than winning a gold in the Geek Olympics?
A> Not being a fucking geek I'd warrant.
Can you do my homework in c++ data structures????
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
TFA states the programs will be automatically scored on characteristics including 'elegance'. How can one program judge the elegance of another?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This sounds too much like something contrived by corporate America.
No, thanks. I'll take the quality olympics.
It's like... "Who can build the next skyscraper the fastest? Now, who wants to occupy it?"
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Let's just hope we can keep the doping scandals to a minimum.
"I use FreeBSD you insensitive clods!"
written on his back ran onto the floor and shoved the leader's chair into the crowd. Scooting the chair back into place cost the leader precious seconds and momentum which dropped him eventually to third place.
Here's what my buddies and coworkers complain about:
My friend went to the International Biology Olympiad, which is basically the sister project of this one. She had loads of fun, so I wish all the best to the kids competing in this competition. One point to note, perhaps: The people who are in this coding competition are all kids in school. This is not determining the fastest coder in the world, it's determining the best young coders. Just thought I'd clear that up.. =)
I thought they only used Windows in the International Special Olympiad in Informatics. :)
What will it like if there is live boardcasting?
Somehow, unlike the "Athletic" Olympics, I don't think they're gonna need to hand out condoms.
Just personal lubricants...
Which Lucky TV network gets to have continous coverage of these events?
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Don't call it an Olympics or you'll get sued by the IOC faster than you can say it.
Here's a few suggestions on what to code:
1) Fastest "Hello World"
2) 1337 0w|\|a63 Code (XP vs. RH9)
3) First one to hack HURD out from Emacs
4) First one to find (or paste) SCOde into Linux (anonymously sponsored but the prize check was stamped from Utah)
5) First to hack AI for dancing Osimo-like Ballmer.
6) First to uninstall their OS and install/compile Gentoo
7) Program a game...'cause we could use another one of them fsckin' Space Invaders clones.
Any particular reason that Apple isn't represented? I think that the competition might be a bit more competitive if the G5 was available.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
So we can know who NOT to hire. A good, employable coder is someone who works well in a team, writes code that can be easily taken up by another coder if necessary, and does not show up the rest of the team in an effort to be "#1". The people going for these olympics have pretty much the exact opposite of every employable skill I look for.
More like fast thinking, puzzle solving skills, knowledge of algorightms, data structures and math (especially combinatorics), concentration under stress, debugging, and even some luck.
:) From what I've seen, format of the competition and problem scope hasn't changed that much since then.
I suck at coding fast, type with few fingers, and pause all the time to mentally execute the code. Got gold in 1991
Back in the day (2000), I actually got into the final of the British Informatics Olympiad. I'm not sure what the format is elsewhere, but basically they sent out a self-administering test to schools (all the schools in the UK, I think) and had them run it locally, seeing how much of a few interesting puzzles you could write in three hours or so - you can find out more on the site. All programming, no justification, you were scored on results (in that round), which I thought was the way it should be - after all, results are what matters in real life!
;-)
;-)
All the cool people were using C or Pascal. I used QuickBASIC! And yet I got the right results for enough of the questions (the C guy got his output board the wrong way up), and so I was invited to Cambridge. The best part about the first round was that I hadn't even done the last round right - I just said "yes, that's right" to the sample case and "No, impossible" to everything else.
Anyhoo, I got to Cambridge (for you USAians, one of our old "Ivy League" colleges) where I learnt to my relief that they had installed QuickBASIC especially for the two of us who had actually got in with it (15 finalists total) - they were shocked at having to, I can tell you! Of course, I was pretty sure at that stage that I wasn't actually going to win, and so I had a great time and zero stress. The tests itself were a) more of the same, but b) there was also an easay paper. Having not read much about the subject formally, I imagine I did dismally on the latter - I think I got about one and a half on the programming at best. Didn't know how to do efficient sorting! Still, it was great fun, and really set my mind on becoming a programmer.
The best part was, we got room, board and tours around Cambridge absolutely free (I guess they were looking to recruit a few of us to Cambridge). I even saw Stephen Hawking whizzing around on his motorised wheelchair! We got given two books at the end of it - Programming Pearls and Introduction to Computer Algorithms. Both darn good books, although I admit to reading the first more closely than the second.
Those too old for this competition or the ACM version should check out the ICFP programming contest. You can work from home, using any language you want, and you have three days to complete the task the give you (24 hours for the lightning division). Typically people work in small teams and use exotic stuff like Dylan, although last year's winning entry was in C++. If you win, you get a cash prize and the judges pronounce your implementation language "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
And in related news, 304 programmers will be going to bed without a woman tonight...
Speed does not necessarily indicate quality. I'll take a slow, but steady programmer any day over someone who outputs crud at great speed. Then again, I'd take someone who can generate good code quickly above those two - but when speed is your primary objective, like it is here, you're not likely to get particularly good quality code.
Nope it's simpler than that- OS X was not allowed because of easy access to Objective C libraries. Cocoa is frowned on as a "Performance Enhancing Language"
Keep it fair folks.
...have all the judges be programmers from AOL and Microsoft. The less it looks like their own code, the higher the score.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Hah, I used QB in the IOI the two years I was in it. Got Bronze both times. A lot of the other people raised eyebrows - some were using Pascal, but all the "real" coders were doing C. At the end of the day, I don't think it mattered much which you used. (The second year, I was using C at home, but didn't feel comfortable enough with e.g. file I/O to use it in the competition).
There was -one- problem that I recall QB being a liability in. If you solved it the "wrong" way, processing speed and memory management became a bit of an issue, and you wouldn't be able to solve the larger cases in QB (the really large ones couldn't be solved the wrong way in C either). With an ideal solution, QB worked just fine, but most people didn't find it.
I actually participated in the IOI for two years and won two silver medals. Anyway, I can attest that the contest is neither about speed nor coding. It's about coming up with algorithms to solve hard problems. Similar to the International Mathematics Olympiad, if anyone's heard of that. If you can come up with a brillant algorithm and prove to yourself that it works on all possible test data in time, then you'll have plenty of spare time to code it in. If you can't do that, then you might get at most a bronze medal (half the people get *some* type of medal). Of course you do need to know your way around whatever language you use to program your solutions, but none of the programs will be more than a couple pages of code (we're not writing a Linux kernel here), and you have 5 hours to solve 3 problems. At the point where you can get most of the algorithms, it's much more important to have good debugging and testing skills than to be able to code quickly.
In fact I've found that the best strategy is to just turn off the monitor altogether and think about the problems for a while. Your most useful tools in the IOI are the pencil and pad of paper they give you.
The ACM programming contest is sort of similar to the IOI in that you have similar time limits and similar amounts of problems per person (8-10 problems for a 3-person team, with 5 hours). However, it's a lot more frantic since you're fighting for terminal time, whereas in the IOI you can take things slowly or run detailed tests. TopCoder (the other big programming contest) is also more speed- and debugging-intensive, although problem solving skills can help a lot if you're able to start with the Hard problem every time for instance.
Appropriate tools are supplied. When I went, it was Windows-only. You could use QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, or Borland C. The IDEs for all three are/were entirely acceptable.
Any bets on whether the winner will be using Linux or XP? I am cheering for the linux people myself.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
How does this compare to the ACM ICPC? For those who don't know ACM also has a college level, and has regional/and world finals each year. As a former participant I'm curious what the diff is, and how you enter this one.
For the rest of us, there will be an on-line public competition hosted through the Valladolid site and run by the University of Waterloo. The next one is on the 19th (3 days away!), free, and everyone can register. Stock up on doritos and join in the fun!
As one of those types of engineers, specifically an electrical engineer, I was not happy to see *nix go. At that time, the programmable logic device and tool vendors saw the migration away from $20,000 Sun boxes. As a result, they moved to Windows. Now, however, many of the EDA tools are available for Linux (generally, supported only for RedHat) since engineers, like myself, have been constantly requesting Linux versions. Windows is still the primary platform, but Linux is now viable platform for programmable logic development.
If you're an American high school or middle school student and are interested in participating in IOI in the future, you should refer to the USACO website. The American IOI team is picked from among the best performers on USACO.
If you're not an American student, USACO is probably still worth checking out, as it permits all pre-university students to compete (although only Americans can be considered for the team), and anybody in the world can enter as an observer. In fact, the vast majority of USACO participants are not American.
USACO is also working on making contest divisions that are more friendly to beginners, if you're worried about difficulty.
The slowest coder will get The 3D Realms Award.