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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."
Then computers in the prisons should be a good rehab route?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Why are you looking at nationality? What are you trying to prove? Is this the 1936 Summer Olympics?
...the strong emphasis on mathematics and science during the Soviet era. Just throw in a bit of Lysenkoism to carry its fruits into the current generation, and presto, world dominance!
What I find interesting is the relative cull rates. As might be expected for a large country with some major IT activity, India was well represented at the starting round, but the subsequent rounds knocked 3 factors of ten off the total. Russia and Belarus both only took about one factor of ten, and the US around two...
Numbers per-capita, much less absolute numbers, aren't wildly interesting; but those are some fairly dramatic differences in attrition...
At least the US is still number one in financial scams and reality TV. Snooki can't program.
Sergey Brin and tell him to keep these Russians away from dominating this American company... oh yeah.... nevermind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Someone once told me this, and it makes sense to me...
It takes a lot of money to fund a lab in medicine, biology, chemistry, experimental physics, but computer science, theoretical physics, and mathematics basically require just a computer or pencil/paper.
Because Russia is relatively poorer and has fewer labs relative to its population compared to, say, the USA, Russia's brightest minds naturally gravitate towards the "cheap" sciences, and that largely explains why they punch substantially above their weight in those fields.
I've also heard it's due to Russia's love of chess, which score one for them, I *really* wish would catch on here.
Either way, they're definitely doing something right.
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.
There's a reason why StarForce (the notorious almost impossible to crack DRM), sophisticated malware, one of the best antivirus software (Kaspersky), cracking of software and games and other highly technical stuff and algorithms originate from Russia and other CIS countries. The fall of Soviet Union led to tons of highly capable programmers without work and income, so some went to dark side while others spend time on good things. Nevertheless, both sides are filled with highly capable people, all thanks to Soviet Union's appreciation to computer technology.
There is also the motivation of the contestant. I would expect a lot of Indian to enlist just with the hope to increase their creds or make their resume stand out, that would mean a bigger proportion of lower skill applicant.
It seems to me that part of the dynamic here is that highly skilled programmers in the US have less of a need to prove themselves in a competition like this - they probably already have good salaries and good jobs. Programmers in poorer countries are probably not as fortunate, though, and taking part in an international programming competition could provide a ticket to a more lucrative future working for a Western company.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but yes, people should have access to computers in prison. Unlike in USA, many other countries do actually try to get prisoners back to being normal, productive people instead of just punishing them.
Now, internet access and such is another point because that could be used to communicate with other criminals outside.. but having a library of programming books and personal computers for prisoners would be a good way to change those people. Programming books being just example, there could be other things too. The main point being; yes, it is much better to try to get those prisoners life back on track instead of just punishing them.
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
In America, a student who is good at math, science and CS is called a nerd. In Russia, such a kid is called smart. Seriously, Russia has always kicked ass in science and math education. We should copy their schools.
Hell even the Indians educated here seem to be fairly useless. Adept at rote learning, useless as engineers. It's cultural.
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.
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).