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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?
You'll find that to be the case with most CS depts. You'll need to study law if you want to screw people.
Lack of Mt. Dew puts US programers at a serious disadvantage.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This doesn't really mean anything by itself. However, it's worth mentioning that the individual attitude is different in the rest of the world than it is in the U.S. (For example, the students at the Shanghai U. might be a bit more motivated to prove their talents than the students in the U.S. thanks to some social doctrines going around in the region).
So well let's assume this is a fair test of programming skill, why is it that an Islamic state's team, Sharif University of Technology, beat out not only the top technical university of India (IIT) but all of the US's Ivy League schools -- not just MIT and CalTech?
Hmm, maybe they solved more problems in less time.
(The above is of course just a theory. It could be a global conspiracy against America).
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you look at the "Top 4", you will see that the region groupings only allows one winner from North America. A Canadian college got this one, but there are US schools in the results list of runner ups.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The complete list of problems can be found here, along with some sample inputs/outputs (usual format for these types of contest).
The finals problem set (PDF) is at the finals home page.
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.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Glad to see "Canada's Top Math and CS University" is pulling in good results overseas too. ;)
Expectations are for the unprepared.
Mediocre programming is perhaps a labour job but I would take one brilliant programmer over five mediocre ones.
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.
...Communist (or ex) countries produce better programmers. Maybe it's because once you've tried commanding a whole economy, programming seems trivial by comparison.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
One of the Michigan Tech. team members was none other than Joe Nievelt one of the RIAA's "best friends"
let's assume this is a fair test of programming skill, why is it that an Islamic state's team, Sharif University of Technology, beat out not only the top technical university of India (IIT) but all of the US's Ivy League schools -- not just MIT and CalTech
I sure hope I misunderstood you there: do you mean to suggest that "a fair test of programming skill" could not possibly have a winner from an Islamic state? Just so we're clear on this, I don't know whether this competition is fair or not (other posters seem to think not) but why would religion have anything to do with it?
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
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
One reason I can think of is because they really are better now. Don't forget, there hasn't been any good reason to study computer science in the US for a while now, unless you _enjoy_ flipping burgers of course. On the other hand, the countries to which all that work is outsourced have a strong need to produce more and more competent programmers. The result is a loss of competence in the US, in favor of those other countries.
I'm a Waterloo student and it's awesome to see how we did. Waterloo competes regularly and has had a winning place several times before.
As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).
As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here.
"I'm not sure how you could objectively measure something like this"
I did the competition in 2001 when I was in college. It may be slightly different now, but back then each team of 3 students got 9 problems and an hour to code solutions on one machine. You submitted your code to a server and it compiled it and ran it against unknown input and output (we knew the parameters, but not the actual input). Success/failure notices, or compilation errors were quickly IM'd back to you.
The team is scored using this criteria
1. Number of problems solved
2. The total time taken before submitting correct answers + any penalty minutes for submitting incorrect or incompilable code.
So a team who got 9 questions right in a half hour would score better than a team who got 9 right in 45 minutes.
(As for how we did, we were able to solve 4/9 questions and tied for 17th place. Results here. I was on the American University team, AU One)
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I participated in the southern regional ACM programming contest. GaTech won with Florida coming in second. The questions are extremely hard. We solved one problem. They give you 5 lines of test data but when the judges test it they will use hundreds of lines of test data. Not only must your program be correct it must also be fast (less than 3 minutes)
;)
oh and honorable mention means you didn't solve any. Take that Tech!
-Brian
Okay, a bit of explaining here. At the ACM you don't come up with fancy solutions printed on a piece of paper, you *implement* them. Your source code needs to pass a set of tests and is given a very limited amount of time for each one of them. In most cases you need to optimize your code a lot (and by this I mean use the best algorithms possible). You submit your code, it gets evaluated automatically and you get a message like "OK", "Error", "Bad format", "Core dump" -- I don't remember exactly all the names, it's been a few years since I participated at an ACM World Finals (Vancouver, 2001). After that you wonder what the heck went wrong (just like in real word, I may add), you modify it, you submit it again and so on. Of course, penalties add up for multiple submissions for the same problem.
DFM (Design for Manufacturing) -- yes, you are correct. But ACM and the other international contests prepare you exactly for that.
--B
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.
Not really. I was an assistant coach for my school's team in 1998 and had a long discussion with the department chair about this.
Basically, with the rules that are in place from the school and the board of regents for the state colleges, there isn't a lot of incentives that can be given to students to participate in something like this. I talked with a member of the Waterloo team and they were getting a couple of class credits for being on the team, which is something our school couldn't give. It wasn't considered appropriate - should we then give credits to someone in athletic studies for being a member of a school athletic team? Another issue (back in 1998) was that most US students didn't need the line on their resume, or the job offer from IBM if they won the contest. (Note: The job offer from IBM to the winning team was anecdotal, but IBM seemed interested in talking to everyone there about job opportunities.) Also, the "good students" don't participate in these contests since most of them have some sort of programming job on the side. I talked to several people about being on the team and they told me they would rather go to work and make US$20-30/hr being a part-time programmer than practicing for a contest.
Just my US$0.02
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I looked at the questions and I was surprised they didn't include some basic computer skills. No where did they ask how to install an operating system. Compiling a kernel wasn't mentioned. Configuring a license server? Nope! MySQL? Not a damn reference.
It's obvious to me that these "computer scientists" aren't skilled for the real world and will never get a respectable IT job.
If programming is like coal mining, can you do a PhD in Coal Mining too?
You, sir, seem to misunderstand what programming is about. Programming is not jotting down some if statements, for loops and the like - any 9 year old can do that after having reading a bit through Learn C++ in 21 days and in the development cycle of a program, it is probably the least time-intensive part.
But defining the problem you're tackling, designing your solution, your strategy, your algorithms, indeed the program itself (and yes, this includes the OO Paradigm - you don't seriously think the OO Paradigm is a funky thing where everything just works automagically with zip effort?) takes up at least half the total development time and it is not "some mental challenge with most part labour", it is purely a mental challenge. The most important tools of a programmer are a pencil and (lots of) paper. After the design is finished, you spend another significant amount of time deciding how to best implement your design. And yes, all of this is important and this is what they teach CS students at universities - or did you think it was all about different ways of writing a while loop? The better your design, the less time you will spend debugging your program (another substantial part of the development cycle of a program and another purely mental task once you've ironed out the compiler errors due to typos).
So don't diss it till you've done it - you clearly haven't.
So they didn't place.
Now all I see is people saying: "The Contest isn't representative", "The Metrics are poor", "The problems are academic", and "I wouldn't judge the state of CS curricula based on a contest"
That's all find and good - as long as you sleep better tonight.
But you still didn't place.
You can see past winners here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm
I'm American, and love my country, but we have to face facts. U.S. society doesn't place a lot of value on academic knowledge, compared to the rest of the world. Our cultural heroes aren't scientists, academics, and thinkers -- they are entertainers and athletes. We respect practicality, and making money, not intellectual understanding. Our society has a longstanding democratic suspicion of elites, including intellectual elites, which often shows up as a disdain for 'impractical' academics. There are several examples of this cultural disdain in the responses to this topic (taking the form of, "who cares, it has no relevance to the practical realm of real-world programming/software engineering."
You can argue about whether or not this disdain for intellectual mastery is good, but the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the theory of evolution isn't widely accepted. Perhaps our culture's disdain for and mistrust of elites has a real price, and this contest is one place it shows up? Perhaps it also encourages many of the brightest students to go into areas where they can make money -- law, medical, or business school -- rather than academia?
Jiao Tong are "host" only insofar as they laid out a great welcome mat for the world. The facilities were excellent and they showed us Chinese acrobats and a just-for-us fireworks show that rivals any I've seen.
ACM ICPC is an American organization, and they have complete control over the judging. IBM supplied the hardware and the ICPC staff supplied the software and judging staff.
In the last hour, any of the 4 gold medallists could have won. Waterloo submitted problem A but didn't get it. The Russian teams submitted problem G but didn't get it. Jiao Tong overcame a 1-problem deficit and then, with about 10 minutes to go, solved problem D to win.
Have a look at the problems and you can decide for yourself whether or not they catered to any particular audience. I think not.
I congratulate Jiao Tong and thank them for their hospitality.
Gordon Cormack
coach,
Waterloo