Slashdot Mirror
Russian Programmers Dominate At Google Code Jam
New submitter Migala77 writes "Now that the third round for Google Code Jam is finished and only 25 contestants are left, we can look at which nationalities performed well and which didn't. Code Jam contestant foxlit has the stats, and some interesting things can be seen. Although there were over 3000 contestants from India in the qualification round (17% of the total) , only 3 of those managed to reach the third round (0.7% of the round 3 contestants) . This in contrast to Russia with 77 out of 747, and Belarus with 13 out of 114 reaching the third round. The U.S. performed somewhat below average too, with only 25 out of 2166 contestants making it to the third round."
The Mighty GOOG entrance numbers are within an order of magnitude of the project euler membership numbers. I think you need an account on PE to see the stats:
http://projecteuler.net/countries
For those who don't want to "compete" in PE but want to know the numbers anyway, I copy some from the article and from PE's registration data:
over 3000 GOOG contestants from India vs exactly 4300 on PE
747 Russian GOOG contestants vs 2269 on PE
114 Belarus GOOG vs 254 on PE
2166 USA GOOG vs 21563 on PE
I don't know much about the GOOG contest but I would guess the Venn Diagram of the GOOG and PE is almost entirely overlapping.
A good question is why less than a tenth of USA PE people competed in the GOOG, yet almost all the India PE people competed in the GOOG.
As far as the elite levels go, this is very superficial, but the names of "first 50 to solve a PE problem" and the names in the forums on PE seem to trend very asian, so Japan might only have 1900 or so contestant, but they're all Ruby Ninjas with leet skills, or whatever. I wish I had real numbers other then vague observations.
Another interesting observation is that the Mighty GOOG short term contest is vaguely roughly around half the size of the permanent/ultra long term PE project.
As a PE guy or player or contestant (or nerd?) I can personally verify that PE is higher mathematics and hard core computer science with virtually no IT component. I don't know anything about the innards of the GOOG competition, can anyone involved describe the ratio of CS::IT or logic::memory in the Mighty GOOGs competition? Also PE merely requires any Turing complete language (although some problems can be solved by non-Turing complete languages anyway, and some can be done on pen and paper if you're hard core or its a REALLY easy problem), does the Mighty GOOG require something specific like Java only or maybe even more specific like "must be an android app" or something like that?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Having (probably) visited your country, I can verify that your gasoline costs more per liter than ours does per gallon (a gallon is "around" four liters)
Also I've seen your (speaking generally) newspapers and you guys have/had crazy import duties and VAT taxes on cars, so ownership and maintenance is very expensive compared to here. Finally your equivalent of the DMV has teeth... you won't allow cars on the road that here would be considered in worn but usable shape.
The feds (well, the GSA) lets us claim 55.5 cents per mile of expense on our cars when used for govt (and presumably business purposes).. This is hyperinflated such that even land barge SUV drivers with horrible insurance rates and expensive maintenance still make a microscopic profit, so needless to say my domestic subcompact with cheap (married dude) insurance makes me a profit of something like a quarter per mile.
I'm estimating it costs me about 30 cents per mile to drive here, and in your country it approaches or exceeds one euro per mile, so it's going to be difficult financially to justify spending 6 euro to deliver a 99 cent hamburger three miles away.
Also our cuisine sucks but its almost designed for a delay in delivery, whereas a lot of the stuff I've eaten in Europe would not benefit by sitting around for 15 minutes and being bounced around in a car before eating.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Take a look - it's not just Russia with high scores, but also Belarus, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Western nations fare much worse, especially as a percentage of guys who make throught. It seems as if more people in USA were convinced of their skills and participated, while EE attracted only those who actually have the skill. This corresponds with real life and self-confidence. EE people seem to judge themselfes harder than others and don't participate in such events even if they have skills.
In any case it's sad to notice that excellent programming skills do not translate to excellent commercial success - many of those talented work for Western companies, do not create good domestic ones.
Feel free to point out if I'm wrong here.
As somebody raised in the Soviet Union I can totally confirm that. In Soviet Union culture (movies and even pop music) scientist or just smart in a scientific sense guy wins. A lot of Soviet era TV shows were about smart people competing (kinda like Jeopardy) and these shows made them TV stars and kids were looking up to them.
Unfortunatelly, this changing now. Partially due to American culture influence.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Russia dominates in technical computer stuff because during the last decades of Soviet Union, the government greatly pushed and spent money for computer education. It's one of the things that actually worked in Soviet Union's communism.
I wouldn't say that USSR had a lot of money spend on computer education. I grew up there, and the first time I saw a computer was when my father took me to his work, and that was already after I was in school.
What Soviets did spend a lot of money on, though, was education in hard sciences in general, but especially math, with physics a close second. If your brains were wired for it, you would get noticed pretty quickly and moved to a specialized school where you'd have 15 hours of math per week by the time you graduated. From there, a fast track to the appropriate degree in the uni, free so long as you can pass the entry exams (which, by that time, you usually could with ease).