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No US College In Top 10 For ACM International Programming Contest 2013
michaelmalak writes "The annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest finished up last week for 2013, but for the first time since its inception in the 1970s, no U.S. college placed in the top 10. Through 1989, a U.S. college won first place every year, but there hasn't been one in first place since 1997. The U.S. college that has won most frequently throughout the contest's history, Stanford, hasn't won since 1991. The 2013 top 10 consists entirely of colleges from Eastern Europe, East Asia, and India."
So what? I don't see any of those schools being real power houses of innovation either.
. . . and . . . how come I never get those programmers when my company outsources . . . ?
For the same reason you never get a knowledgeable person if you dial a helpdesk.
Those outsourcing countries have internal markets as well, including normal programming jobs.
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Actually, various small Pacific Island Nations are higher, then various Middle Eastern nations, then Mexico. Then US. Nauru and Samoa are 95% obese.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
What manner of "real world" is it where there aren't crazy deadlines and time to design and code properly?
This programming contests have nothing to do with real world programming or the skills need for most CS fields.
Phew, glad you cleared that up. For a second there I thought that the education system in the US had been flushed down the toilet!
Actually, Mexico just took over the top spot for obesity.
If you wanna be the best, you've GOT to be hungry.
I would guess that you've never entered one of these competitions. To do well, it is not sufficient to come up with quick and dirty solutions; these will generally fail. You have to be able to find a good algorithm, quickly, and implement it, catching all the edge cases. These are certainly valuable real-world skills.
Disclaimer -- I was on the Rice team that took 3rd in 1986 (before there were any international teams at all).
If someone does well in these contests, they're probably really good programmers. Inexperienced, yes, but......that's why they're still in college. They are programmers who know how to get the computer to do what they want, which is more than a lot of 'professional' programmers.
It's not clear why you think scalability and correctness aren't tested by these contests. A lot of the problems have huge datasets, so if you use an algorithm that doesn't scale, you will fail. And of course correctness is the point.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Or better, it _is_ already lazy. I have done some competitive programming while studying, but it was a small group of students in a special elective course and only 6-7students in it. I already was a PhD student at that time and not taking the course, but I knew the professor doing it and he had told me that he was setting this up and also participating himself. Ended up being 1st until the professor and another student started "cheating" by using inline-assembler ;-)
Still, even in this specialized, elective course, only half of the student put any real effort into it. That is not good. Programming is something you need to be able to do reasonably well if you do anything advanced in IT, or you will never be any good at it. Historically, the west did protect its economic advantage by having better infrastructure, machinery and materials, but that is over. Any bright person with at least slow Internet access, reasonable English language skills and an older computer with Linux or one of the xBSDs on it can compete now on a world-class level, geography has become pretty meaningless. Or rather, being in the west is a disadvantage due to a pervasive sense of entitlement. Personally, I think this is a good thing. Competing on merit only is the only working way to identify talented people.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which of the Indian teams are represented? I see one at 60th...
Irrelevant. What's relevant: if there's little need in the US (or any other country) economy for software people, it is likely there will be no winners from US in the ACM competition (or winning will happen only as an exception rather than the norm).
In a sociological context, one needs quantity to develop quality consistently over time (that is: it is highly likely the talents need nurturing by an existing culture in their field for them to reach their full potential; and this requires quantity).
Note that quantity alone is not sufficient for the quality to emerge - if in need for another example, you only need to look at the today's music
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
From looking at some of those problems, it seems to me that it's more important to be a better mathematician than a programmer.
Ah, in that case its even worse! It indicates the US is lacking behind other countries in producing quality mathematicians!
And our company employs a lot of our programmers from the university maths department. With good reason.
The problems are such that you don't need huge datasets to choke O(n) solutions in the execution time limit. Winners at these competitions know how to produce efficient code. They may need to learn maintainability, but I'd wager that is an easier skill than producing the kind of efficient *and* correct solutions they come up with. Try your hand at some of the problems to see how hard they are: http://uva.onlinejudge.org/
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you