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Google Code Jam 2005 Winners Announced
Ember writes "The results of Google Code Jam are in. The winner is Marek Cygan from Warsaw University. Second prize goes to Erik-Jan Krijgsman from University of twente (Holland) and third to Pyotr Mitritchew from Moscow State University." Registration for the event took place back in July and Google reported a total of 14,500 registrants which is almost twice as many as last year, making for some stiff competition.
The US never had a monopoly on education. I mean, don't forget that the earliest modern-style universities were formed in Europe around 1200. Many were operating for around 500 years before the US was even formed. Today many of those institutions have been around twice as long as the United States, let alone the American educational institutions.
And before that there were centres of learning in Arabia, Egypt, Asia and Greece.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
First of all, it cost them over $155,000, as that is how much prize money they gave out. They also spent quite a bit to fly 100 people to the bay area, put us up in a hotel, etc. Second, everyone competes on the same problems, and they are problems that most people could solve given enough time. Google does this to encourage programming, as well as to recruit programmers, not to benefit from the work these programmers do.
I beta tested TopCoder once upon a time (they paid well for a few hours of college student's time). It has all the above problems plus a few not mentioned (limited ability to compile and test, limited access to tools, limited languages, etc). The two biggest things not mentioned here are that:
1)The problems aren't real world. They're heavily algorithmic, and generally a google search can find you pseudocode. The competitions are generally won by whomever knows the algorithm already.
2)Their code frequently requires heavy knowledge of the standard library for that language. If you don't know the StringTokenizer class in Java or wierd STL calls in C++, don't bother. Perhaps not an issue for everyone, but I learned C++ before templates existed, and never really liked the STL.
3)Diving right into code is generally a bad way to program, but in this competition spending time on design is a losing proposition.
THat said, it can be a fun thing to try out. I enjoyed it back in my beta testing days, even though back then they only allowed Java (one of my least favorite languages).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There were 3 competitors from the US in the top 10 (4th, 5th, and 8th). Also, there were more coders from the US in the finals than from any other country.
I believe that Poland had the second largest contingent. Poland has been doing quite well in programming competitions, as the competitors there get press more like sports players do in the US, which attracts other talented people to the field.