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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)."
OUt of the four colleges I was going to go to, Penn State was probally the "worts" and CS. Turns out they tied for 17. Just in case you wanted to know the others were RIT, Drexel, and UMBC. This just show people that newsweek and the other ranking don't mean anything. Ironicly, they dn't offer SE on main campus.
They have "Middle East" and "Asia" as separate places, when most of the Middle East is actually part of Asia. If Syria had won, they'd have to place it in two at the same time.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Cal Tech 28th, Duke 29th...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
"The same example could be applied to the Olympics."
Oh most certainly, and it HAS. Keeping in mind that I suggested no cheating or conspiracy, we can liken this to Bob Beamon's controvercial long-jump in the 1968 Olympics. It has been suggested by many that the amazing distance he was able to cover was due to the reduced air-resistance at high altitude, and that his record should not be compared to lower-elevation games without re-calibration.
The same might apply here. There are thousands of reasons that one team might answer 8 questions where no one else was able to. Some are language-related (clearer translations in one language), cultural (the problems might have been ones which this school often deals with), geographical (I think this is a remotely administered test, but if not, jet-lag could be a factor), etc.
I'd really like to hear from someone who was involved, and get a sense of how they felt about the test and its administration.