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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.
Does anyone know if companies like IBM, Microsoft, Sun, SGI (well, maybe not SGI..) and some of the other big names in the computer industry are going to start holding similar competitions?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
well....it actually cost them $155,000 in prizes plus i'm assuming they picked up the bill to fly the top 100 there AND for room and board
but yes, much more cost effective still, although I don't feel that this kind of a competition shows as much about a coder as through other means, impressive, but there is more to a coder than what is shown here
You're confusing 'driven' and 'smart.' 'Driven' means that coding can make you 10x what your neighbors do and you can live like a king, so you work your tail off to get up in the world through knowing as much as possible about coding.
'Driven' people in the States are going to business school and meeting all the bigwigs' kids instead because you won't be able to pay off your student loans in the American computer industry for fifteen years instead of the five it takes you working in accounting / consulting...
The unbelievably, incredibly, killer-code 'Smart' people in the States are either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing, making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k, self-effacing enough that they don't care, or already working for Google, and therefore ineligible for participation.
My little site.
Yea, I thought it was something similar as well. But, what about the top coders in high school or college ? I'm sure the ones that are employed in US or Europe didn't really even attempt. But, what about the college kids, who are shepherded into competitions like this ?
By their schools, or their own egos ?
The unbelievably, incredibly, killer-code 'Smart' people in the States are either starting their own small businesses and don't have time for this kind of thing, making enough money that they don't want to take a huge time risk for a possible 10k, self-effacing enough that they don't care, or already working for Google, and therefore ineligible for participation.
How condescending. Those factors apply to other countries too. The USA is not the only country where smart people start businesses. The USA is not the only country where smart people can make money. And believe me, the USA doesn't have a monopoly on self-effacing.
So basically, the excuse you are using for the USA doing poorly is an excuse the other countries could use too, but didn't because they actually did well.
I've noticed a tendency for people to write off programming contests because it's not "really about programming", in so many words. I'd like to point out that these aren't "software development" contests: TopCoder does run those, and they are very different from the algorithm competition (the name the more popular contest goes by).
Do you know why companies are looking to hire the winners of these contests? Is it so they can put tomek or SnapDragon to work chugging out applications? Hardly. Have you ever seen some of the harder problems they have to solve? They are incredibly agile when it comes to algorithm hacking. I've seen these people write probabalistic solutions that passed all the tests by some smart pruning and faith in statistics. That was after solving two other problems, all within a 75-minute time limit. Speed isn't everything, but there is definitely something to be said for someone who can crunch abstractions that quickly.
The simple fact is that a lot of companies would love to have a "brain guy" of that magnitude around, because being able to solve complex algorithmic problems quickly is actually sometimes a desirable trait.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
the blurb tells the names of the winner(s), but gives no clue as to what their project was.
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,
I am willing to bet that the prize, fare and hotel money was dwarfed by the costs of the Google employees that participated.
People underestimate the cost of developing software. Most the money, however, is in overhead. Open source, code competitions and incentive programs (*cough* *cough* pay attention NASA *cough*) are cheap ways to avoid paying overhead yourself. You just let the individual competitors or contributors worry about that.
Consider that 1 full-time programmer is very expensive to care and feed. Typical numbers are $55k for salary and at a minimum (outside EA) another $40k for equipment/electricity/janatorial/etc overhead. The question then is: are the results of the contest more or less than the work that $155,000 would have bought Google on the normal job market?
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."