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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)."
...a sad commentary on the state of programming departments in the States
Not sure if it's surprising or not.
Is it the lack of quality programs these days or lack of interest on the part of highly talented students to participate?
It is also a well known fact - and, actually, one that should make you ashamed of your country - that the vast majority of graduate students in science are not Americans. Much like in economy, the world supports your first place.
It's not anywhere near fair. Our ACM chapter competed a few years ago. We didn't make it past the first round on account of getting one problem "wrong." By "wrong," of course, I mean that we produced a better solution than the judges had, and some other teams produced the same, non-optimal solution that they had, so we were wrong. I later sent in a detailed proof of our answer's correctness as the unique optimal solution, but we never heard back.
For what it's worth, that problem was "Given a list of latitude and longitude points on the surface of Mars, which has radius R, what is the minimum total length of cable needed to connect those points to form a network, if the cable is 1m above the planet's surface? Assume that Mars is spherical."
To this day, I have no idea what the "correct" answer was that took several hundred more meters of cable than our solution did.
One of the Michigan Tech. team members was none other than Joe Nievelt one of the RIAA's "best friends"
These competitions seem to be very academic. Do they relate to programming in the real world? Although I applaud the people who won, I don't think that these are the right kind of competitions to be training people for. They should have a real open source design competition, where contestants are graded on the outcome of a large project. Extra points could be given for showing good use of testing, as well as good documentation and coding. You could also look at the use of special algorithms developed, but don't base all the points on this. There's more to programming these days than fancy algorithms.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
To begin, no I didn't attend any of the places mentioned in this article so I'm not biased.
;-)
Now the host placing first may seem a bit suspicious, but the other universities in the top four certainly lend some credibility to it.
I've worked with a number of russion developers which have come from those universities and they were quite brilliant. It seems they actually teach math and physics there, what a concept!
I personally rate the University of Waterloo (in Canada) the top computer science university in North America. Yes high profile places like MIT have some brilliant people, but I've found the University of Waterloo has the most consistant quality of graduates. If you look at the accomplishments of Waterloo grads it pretty impressive. Research In Motion (Blackberries) are probably the most well known company founded by UofW grads, but there are lots of others which are also very impressive. Thier policy on requiring LOTS of real world experience for the degree and work/research opportunities in there technology park also gives lots of great experiance.
I've found UofW grads aren't those "fresh out of college" types who have some book knowledge, but not much practical experience. They tend to walk out after graduating ready to REALLY contribute instead of needing a lot of "mentoring" which most fresh grads need (I know I did).
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
According to the official scoreboard the top 3 are Moscow, St. Petersburg and Waterloo (all ranked with same amount of solved questions). Shanghai placed 4th, but they're the champions?
This is very much an effort based on the teams themselves. The cream of the crop is picked from the school's department, and they train/practice for months. If you were to lift any other student and send them off to competition, the lack of preparation would make them noncompetitors. These competitions exercise one very specific programming skill: Dash off a program that can do this impressive thing (with not much real-world applicability) as fast as possible, as a team. Real-world situations never call for this sort of programming, so these people are truly drilling for this type of event.
Maybe they put one point at 0,0 and you got a divide by zero error? ACM put in all kinds of test data like that which is to any sane person completely impossible for the given question. When I was in the regionals a LONG time ago the ACM actually rescored one of the problems after the contest was over, adding extra test data so another team's problem would pass but ours would not (there was a conflict with the rules and apparently they thought it was easier to just cheat). We were hosting that one which is the only reason we found out.
Overall I don't put much stock in the results because it's really more of a contest about robotic perfectionism. Unlike what people might expect there is extremely little creativity or problem-solving involved; each team has huge books of problems that they laboriously solve over and over again and there are never any fundamentally new problems in the competitions. I mean not like they could come up with an entirely new type of problem for each questions, but they always follow the same pattern: each problem has 1 fundamental approach you have to use (dynamic programming, graph-coloring, pattern-matching, monte-carlo) and then it's solved. Combine that with not telling any clues about why the program failed and it's really geared towards more robotic programmers. I got out of it precisely because there was virtually no creativity or thinking involved at all, at the professional level.
Also it's virtually impossible to detect cheating... if you watch these people, they basically start coding right from the start anyway so if you already knew the problem and solution there would be little difference to see, it would just look like that team was really good. Or maybe you see test data, or somebody elbows you and says 'be sure to check for 0,0 on the mars problem'.
A much better approach was done on topcode.com... there you get to see the test data and why your program failed. Then afterwards other contestants get to look at your code for a while and purposely try to break it with their own (valid) test cases. And you get bonus points for breaking other people's programs.
. In my own experience, at Oklahoma State University the ACM is virtually non-existant. I served as PR Officer in my last semester, and I think we had 4 meetings. Besides the officers, only a handful of people attended the regular meetings, and the only reason anyone signed up to be a member was because we stopped charging a local chapter membership fee. I don't think any local chapter members got a national membership. Our faculty and staff were not at all envolved in the ACM. There are also fewer and fewer students getting into programming these days - if anyone touches a computer field they go after business comm or MIS, because of the lure of better cash without having to learn so much math and science. So I point the finger at envolvement. In my experience, there was not enough envolvement by the students or faculty to get a team of competitive, motivated programmers to represent our school. I'm curious as to whether other schools in the US have the same problems.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
And I'm not hostile to Islam -- I once shouted "Allahu akbar!" during rush hour at the intersection of Lawrence and Homestead. (I admit, mainly because I thought it was a subversive act.)
Seastead this.
Something is fishy about those results. Think about it.
Even if so, it is a good "recruitment activity" for the sponsor (IBM).
Americans tend not to be well traveled (at least outside the country)...
The times they are a changing; when I was younger than today, the "American in Paris" (my age) was also to be seen in the rest of Europe in crowds, at least it seemed so. The bias then was that US-Americans are "well travelled".
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The ACM problem sets. I don't know when the current problems get added, but all the old ones, plus more, are on this site. You can write the program, then submit it to their online judge to see if it's correct.
Brute force usually doesn't work, so you need to know the right algorithm. It's tough, but it's fun!
Ardente veritate incendite tenebras mundi
That's what I liked about the programming contest (I was on Michigan State University's team in '92 and '94, going on to the Finals in '94). Virtually every problem they gave us in either regional or at Finals I could code up a solution for in under 10 minutes---if I was going to brute-force it. For most of the problems, the difficulty was to code it in an efficient (speed, memory, or both) manner, and that's what they were really testing.
For example: given a random set of N pairs of integers (coordinate pairs), give the largest number of points that are colinear. Incredibly trivial to write as a brute force (N^2 algorithm, compare each point to every other point), but takes some understanding to do it more efficiently (N log N). Of course, the judges gave you a huge point set and a strict execution time limit that showed that you found the efficient algorithm.
(This was Problem A from the 1994 East Central Regional)
Rarely, they were tricky in another manner (the example I can think of was coordinate determination by triangularization, and the test set made sure you could watch for divide-by-zero problems in your math and change the coordinate system to accomodate).
I went to one. When we (our team) got to the question-asking session, we wondered why the people were asking about the number of spaces and completely trivial and/or ridiculous stuff. Turns out that they test the results by COMPARING FILES.
Not to mention that the problems they ask are much prefabricated problems - if you know their solution, you're in. It's like "have you been to this contest before? Yes, watch out for the subway one. It's a recursive tree" - or - "if you don't know algorithm X for analysing Y sequences numbers, you're gonna lose."
It's no *programming* contest at all. It's much more like an algorithm-solving+text formatting race. They don't test your REAL programming skills - your ability to create your own programming libraries, the organization of your source code, the maintainability, etc.
I was completely disappointed by that contest. It's much more like a sponsorship promoting ACM products and courses disguised as a programming contest.
Want to win a contest? Enter a FOSS project and fix the more bugs / implement the more features CLEANLY.
Now THAT's a contest.
"Or maybe I should just go to canada when I finally decide to go back to grad school :)"
Please do. Grad school in Canada is a bit different from the U.S. We speak the same language, and we publish in the same journals and, for the most part, attend the same conferences. But we're a bit different. I hesitate to say "better" because I don't buy into the linear-ranking principle. Everybody wants to excel, but I think there's a bit more diversity in opinion here as to the meaning of "the best."