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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)."
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?
Why? Because it didn't place a team in a coding competition? I wouldn't judge a countries technical ability based on something as abstract as this.
I havent read the article due to slashdotting but something like a programming competition seems very odd. I'm not sure how you could objectively measure something like this, and even if you could; as a programmer I can say that the most important quality to have is imagination or innovation, not the ability to sling the technically best code.
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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"
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
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.