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2006 ACM Programming Contest Complete

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-wrappered-up dept.

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."

13 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. GO USA!!!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Woohoooooooo! Wait a minute...

  2. In retaliation by Snarfangel · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...MIT stole Saratov State University's cannon.

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    This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
  3. Not final scores... by qbproger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

    - Joe
  4. One Question & A Short Rant by hyfe · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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 :)

    --
    "" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
    1. Re:One Question & A Short Rant by arrrrg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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/

    2. Re:One Question & A Short Rant by jbf · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a member of the second place team in world finals many moons ago, I have to disagree. I think the problems are actually quite simple algorithmically, and that the hard part is quickly writing working code for semicomplicated problems (including input parsing) with only one computer shared three ways.

  5. I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?!?!? by shadowen1977 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I like this quote from the story.... "When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?" Ask my boss.... He needs it in 5.

  6. Re:Ugh not again... by Tammuz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's generally unfair to judge ACM teams by the polish of their answers, since the only criteria is to solve the problem in minimum time. Similarly, problems are chosen with the time-constraint in mind, not out of any attempt to further science. If you want that, try the MCM.

    What's impressive about the winning solutions is that they went from having nothing to implementing a working program from scratch, under stress in only a few minutes. While that is arguably not applicable to being a programmer in real-life, just as being an Olympic sprinter doesn't prepare you for any particular job, it is certainly a commendable intellectual achievement.

  7. Re:Ugh not again... by Expert+Determination · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's no *programming* contest at all. It's much more like an algorithm-solving+text formatting race. They don't test your REAL programming skills - your ability to create your own programming libraries, the organization of your source code, the maintainability, etc.
    Oh please! That's like saying the Olympics aren't a real contest because they only test the prowess of athletes, not their ability to tidy up the locker room after use, their politeness towards other clients at the gym or how nice their outfits look on TV.
    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
  8. Online ACM problems by BinaryOpty · · Score: 4, Informative

    For those who want to know more about this contest in the form of actually attempting ACM questions, then I suggest heading over to their problemset archive which not only has ACM stuff from the last 5 years but a large number of non-ACM programming problems in the same vein. You can sign up with them and have your solutions to their problems checked for correctness.

    Since the website's a design massacre, to get to the ACM problems you need to click on the link marked THE CII ICPC LIVE ARCHIVE !!! in the news bar, or just click on that one right there.

  9. And conversely... by Expert+Determination · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...I've spent too much time in companies where people write nice, neat, tidy, well documented and easy to maintain code, but nobody actually knows how to do anything other than plumb one API into another. Every so often I'd come across a tool that someone had written that actually did something and I'd be bemused. How the hell did this lot write that? And I'd dig down through the source code and eventually find that under the mountain of wrappers and delegators and empty architecture there was actually a nugget, like V'ger, that did real work. And someone would explain to me "that's the code that Joe wrote years ago, he left and now we daren't touch that stuff, we just maintain the wrappers".

    The truth is that you need both kind of people in software companies. And the other truth is that the people who write the nuggets do interesting work that is worthy of displaying publicly in a contest. And the rest do work that isn't.

    Having said that, plumbing competitions aren't completely unheard of.

    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
  10. Waterloo! by mrtroy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here is a picture of our library taken during this exam period

    Library
     

    --
    [I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
  11. Actual results by insaneparadox · · Score: 5, Informative

    As noted previously, the mentioned scores were from an hour before the contest's end. My sources give the actual, final medal results as the following:

    1. Saratov State University (Russia) - 6 problems
    2. Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) - 6 problems
    3. Altai State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
    4. University of Twente (Netherlands) - 5 problems
    5. Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China) - 5 problems
    6. St. Petersburg State University (Russia) - 5 problems
    7. Warsaw University (Poland) - 5 problems
    8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) - 5 problems
    9. Moscow State University (Russia) - 5 problems
    10. Ufa State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
    11. University of Alberta (Canada) - 4 problems
    12. University of Waterloo (Canada) - 4 problems

    Four teams each received gold, silver, and bronze (in the above order). For the same number of problems, the order is based on penalty minutes.