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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."
What manner of "real world" is it where there aren't crazy deadlines and time to design and code properly?
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.
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.