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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.
I guess Google didn't forget Poland.
sigfault. core dumped.
It doesn't surprise me that Google continues to increase Brain Drain in other big IT-focused companies (Microsoft, etc).
Google seems to realize that information is the most valuable commodity now and in the future. While most companies fight to contain their hold of old information, Google invests in new ways to sort and distribute the information others have created.
Programming is the real weapon of the war to produce information and sort it. By enabling programmers to compete, for profit, Google finds a huge new resource: ideas. What will the next information gathering or sorting device be? Hiring 15,000 people would cost millions. Forcing them to compete cost $10k.
Unfortunately, this is counter-productivity for most folk here. 15000 people just worked for free, and Google reaped the short term benefits. It'll be interesting to see how Google utilizes the optimized routines of non-winners, if they're allowed to.
I find that such competitions are generally pretty worthless... like math competitions. The ability to solve problems that, while "complex" , are still solveable in mere hours, is not really indicative of a truly great talent in either field, mathematics or computer programming. It is simply indicative of a great talent of coming up with elegant solutions to very small, localized problems. Fine for the competition, but winning gives little reason that this young man will be any more successful a programmer than any other in the contest.
A feat worthy of congratulations, to be sure, but it has no bearing on the real world - though many, including Google, pretended that it does.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I would like to know what the winning entries where.
First of all,
Congratulations to the winners.
Now the "scandalous" question, where the entries from US programmers ranked. Last year, the winner was from Argentina, this year from Poland. So, all the talk about US losing the science front could be true.
I don't want to take away from the people who won, or the countries and institutions that are educating them, but I live in USA, and I'm curious, how the contestants from here did.
On the Code Jam page there is a link at the bottom to a recruiting page.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
... was this a contest or a recruitment tool?
Yes.
(I would have thought that was obvious)
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
Maybe I just me, but I don't see how being able to solve TopCoder-style problems makes you a great programmer. Great programmers write easy-to-understand, supportable code. This competition doesn't encourage that in any way.
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.
Better. You can go and play them yourself. It's usually something like, "Find the fourth numeric digit in a string passed" or "create an implementation of data transform XYZ." Nothing too tremendously difficult, so you have to be a fast typer with excellent accuracy. Producing a low number of runtime bugs significantly helps as well.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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 ?
It strikes me as odd that all three winners are students. I mean, shouldn't an experienced coder be better at this kind of thing?
This summer the company I work for wanted to hire some students for some simple programming job we would like to have done, but didn't have the time to do ourselves. To test if the student could really write some code, I create a small programming exercise, someting quite simple. I tested it on the programmers first, and they all took about 15 to 20 minutes to implement a working solution. The students got an hour to solve the problem, and only one of the about 20 applicants was able to solve the problem within the hour! So... are these student so much better? Or do the "real" programmers not compete in this contest?
I compete in online programming contests. This does not mean I am a great programmer, or that the winner in these contents are. It does mean however, that the winner is familiar with lots of algorithms and when, where and how to use them. This is really what it's all about - applying algorithms you have learned, under pressure.
:)
Almost all of the more famous names in programming contents are the guys who, over the years, have practiced and solved thousands of programming problems such as the ones you can find at ACM and TopCoder. You don't have to be a super genius (if you are, you probably have better things to do) just stick with it. After a few hundred problems, you know how to do it. It's like rubiks cube and playing Quake.
Whether it's geeky, useful, boring, fun or manual labour is what you make of it.
You must be a Slashdot editor: Your HTML code is horrible and you can't count. Twente is just before Twentwune, not Thirte.
The article caught my eye, I'm always curious about new and upcoming programmers and am a fan of Google. So, what great thing did the winner of this contest produce? Turns out, nothing. He won a contest in coding, which I'm not sure tells anybody much of anything.
It's kind of like a spelling bee. Virtually anyone in the top x% is equally capable in spelling acumen. On any given day, any given playah could, or would be a winner in a spelling bee.
Factors:
I am sure the winner of this programming contest is bright, but I don't think it brings anything much to the programming/computer science world. But then, I guess it doesn't have to.
Congratulations to the winner.
It is mostly highschool aged students pushed by their respective schools so the school can get some local press.
This guy Cygan is from the Warsaw University, not from a high school. His colleagues from the same departament already won other prizes: ACM IPC and Top Coder 2003.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
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
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.
I just wanted to mention couple of things that might have influenced the recent results of polish programmers. Firstly, quite a few years ago a few people started to train promising young programmers in the art of algorithm design. Note, that they start very early, often in the primary school. These boys (usually) are trained by the best polish lecturers and older colleagues. Later, they often represent Poland in the international contests, with quite some achievements. But it's not only this group. Few years ago Warsaw University started a national programming contest in cooperation with the biggest polish newspaper. The contest takes about a week, and each day new tasks are given. It always starts with fairly easy ones, only later to go into really hard problems. This attracts many young people, that know how to implement e.g. simple sorting but don't really know much about e.g. graph algorithms. Competition in these contests gives these young people opportunity to extend their knowledge, and since it is a recurring event, they learn in the meantime and get better and better. Also, people from countries like Russia and Poland for a long time didn't have access to the modern technology, so instead of playing with machines, they played with theory. And in algorithms, the real problems lie in the design, not in the implementation. Finally, we're smart :)
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.
While this is true it is also irrelevant. For relevant data look at the past 50 years. European higher education is getting worse and worse, in the US it's been getting better and better. There is a reason why the 17 of the top 20 universities in the world are in US.
I'm German and go to a top German university (Working on my PhD) but I've got a Masters from a middle of the range US university and the US university was supperior in so many ways it's not even funny.
This isn't Summer of Code, it's CodeJam. CodeJam is an algorithmic competition, it's much more akin to a track meet than a barn-raising. So there were no "winning projects", only winning solutions. You can read the final round problems, if you'd like.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Ok, I guess i did miss your point, here is why it is funny:
Before the 2004 election there were 3 scheduled debates between John Kerry and W. John Karey was talking about the lack of countries in the Iraq alliance and listed off a few. Bush came back with "you forgot Poland". It was a pretty funny moment as the inclusion of polands 500 or whatever troops doesn't do much to refute kerry's point and actually pulls more attention on the fact that the US is in there alone.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
the blurb tells the names of the winner(s), but gives no clue as to what their project was.
Solve increasingly difficult algorithmic problems within a set time period? How about write a piece of enterprise software with no requirements, users you've never met, an analyst who can barely check their email, and a project manager thinks unit-tests and documentation are "Version 2" features? Welcome to my hell, college boy!