2006 ACM Programming Contest Complete

prostoalex writes "World finals for 2006 ACM programming contest took place in San Antonio, TX this year, and the results are in. Russia's Saratov State University solved 5 contest problems in record time, followed closely by Altai State Technical University (Russia) with 5 problems solved as well. University of Twente (Netherlands), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), Warsaw University (Poland), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Moscow State University (Russia), University of Waterloo (Canada) and Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) all completed 4 problems."

Comments

Not final scores...

[qbproger]

As someone who has their school at the competition, and I'm on the programming team (though my team didn't make it this year). Those are the scores as of one hour left in the competition.

They don't update the scores during the last hour to keep suspence for the awards ceremony. So this isn't really news at all, and the post is going to be meaningless as soon as they update the standings. I'm expecting them to be posted soon though as I think the awards ceremony ended recently.

One Question & A Short Rant

[hyfe]

1. Anybody managed to find the actual test questions?
It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".

2. If you ever see Russian State Universities at the top of anything, be very, very cautious. I studied at MGU (Moscow State University) for a little while, and it was frankly appaling. They were taught extremely specific skillsets, they knew exactly what they would be tested in in advance of tests and didn't study *anything* else. It was like a game of 'getting through Uni without learning *anything*' which outranked anything I've ever seen back home (or heard of in the US). The methology probably lends itself well to predefined, known tests, but it produces practically useless students.

(To be fair, here back home, the ones who really learn something are the ones with a real interest in the subject, and they learn most of it outside class. There were really bright people at MGU too. It was the mindnumbingly staggering uselessness of the average student there which amazed me. It was supposed to be a "Top University".. oh, and you had to bring your own toiletpaper if you wanted to take a dump :)

Re:One Question & A Short Rant

[arrrrg]

It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".

You must be talking about another contest, on crack, or a super-genius (I won't hazard a guess as to which). I was on the Berkeley ACM team this year, and the International-level problems are HARD ... unless by "complexity" you mean the difficulty of writing a guess-and-check "solution" (which will be exponentially too slow). Usually, coming up with an algorithm with good asymptotic time complexity is the focus, and is very difficult. Almost all of them are not ones you can look at and just say "oh, that's max flow", etc, unlike some of the regional contest problems. And, from my experience at least, optimization is not that important at all. If you get the right algorithm, the problems can typically be solved in well under the time limit without doing anything fancy. If you do the naive thing, no amount of constant-factor optimization will allow the thing to finish before the universe ends. Just my $.02 ... don't take my word for it though, look at last year's problems and see what you think: http://cii-judge.baylor.edu/