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29th ACM Intl. Programming Contest Results
mathinator writes "The 29th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, hosted by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, are now over and the results are in.
Congratulations to the top 4 teams who will be walking away with gold medals. They are Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg Institute of Optics and Mechanics, and Canada's University of Waterloo (coming in at 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively. The top 4 get gold medals).
Regional champions are: University of Waterloo, Canada (North America); Moscow State University, Russia (Europe); University of Cape Town, South Africa, (Africa and the Middle East); Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil (Latin America); Shanghai Jiaotong University, China (Asia); and University of New South Wales, Australia (South Pacific)."
Hmmmm...the hosts also won... I declare shenanegans!
Because the USA has pretty piss poor programming education compared to some other countries in the world?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Probably has more to do with students being inclined to compete in the various US-based ACM competitions rather than travel to China. Although everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon quickly, I don't see why a three-person team competing in some foreign programming contest should be representative of program quality or lack thereof in schools like MIT, CalTech, Carnegie Mellon, etc.
Or Western Europe for that matter, none of which are to be found in the top 12. Did they even enter or just outsource everything to the "Developing Countries"?
This is not the sig you are looking for...
We americans are better suited for the higher-level jobs in IT. Mere coding can be done by anyone. We didn't WANT to win this contest or those grapes.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
"As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results"
Oh, I'm not insinuating anything. I'm just saying that it's pretty seriously unlikely that the only team in the WORLD to solve all 8 problems would also be the host, and there is a very high probability that there's some other causal association. I don't want to insinuate that it was "cheating" per se (could be that a language, cultural or geophysical bias was introduced).
Still, it's a pretty strange thing. Hmmm... in fact, did anyone plot the results on a map? Are there any physical, political or cultural corollations? Does anyone who took part want to speak up? Were there any difficulties that you had other than those implicit in the test itself?
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Half the posts here are excuses for the U.S not placing. Stop rationalizing people, and just accept what happened.
American superiority in any field is not a given - it has to be fought for.