For industry/career use, VB.net is perhaps not a top choice - but it is not altogether unused. And, in any case, the important concepts learned in this kind of contest will be language independent.
And, yeah, VB is really easy to teach: great IDE, magically good edit-and-continue, simple debugging options, simple syntax, no worries about object lifetimes, intuitive handling/conversion of strings and integers, and a good set of generic lists, dictionaries, hashtables, etc that are reasonably easy to use...
(Of course, there's still a few real "gotchas" that are likely to come up in a programming competition: no bignums, goofy array syntax, automatic type conversion with division, no short circuiting by default, sometimes unintuitive operator precedence... but nothing that can't be gotten around or debugged through relatively simply).
I believe the winner competes under the handle of Tourist on TopCoder. He's ranked 14th currently (among competitors of all ages). There is exactly one North American ranked higher than him (ICPC legend and generally amazing Derek Kisman).
And who do I expect to win IOI? An 18 or 19 year old. This is a very prestigious competition, and many of the competitors have been training hard for years. 14 to 18 is a significant age gap and many of his competitors are amazing prodigies in their own right. I find it extremely impressive that he's performed to this level.
Rewriting in assembler would be a very strange strategy from someone who knew anything about algorithms. If I had two programmers, one of them I thought of as a good "designer" and the other I thought of as a good "algorithms programmer", I would trust the latter more to come up with a scalable solution. I would expect a generally bad solution - like rewriting in assembler - to be much more likely to come from someone who had no experience with algorithm competitions.
Writing scalable algorithms to deal with large inputs is a core task for algorithms competitors, and they're forced to understand the difference between "optimizing" and "achieving better asymptotic complexity".
I see plenty of magic numbers in code - but most of them are just arbitrary failures, or sentinels, or tweaked constants. A search engine wouldn't have anything to say about those.
The few magic numbers I could think of that are meaningful - like for example c704dd7b (used in CRC) - are long and widely used enough to already come up with fine results in Google.
...if so, that's garbage. I mean, the prize support is great - but if you're going to take a stab at a big prize like that, you need some time. It seems very likely the winners will be people who were already midway through development.
If their goal is to stimulate new projects and attract broad participation, give a reasonable time frame - at least a few months. Alternatively, if this is a contest that's been open for some time (and it's not immediately obvious from the page linked to) then I take all that back:)
Maybe we should have application challenges where we say "write the easiest to use calculator":)
There is. TopCoder holds contests for application design, development, architecture, specification, and graphic design. These contests are used to develop real applications (rather than just for contest sake, like the algorithm competitions) so they actually pay reasonably well too.
It could just be that the US coders are no longer interested.
It's certainly likely that there's a lot of US coders who could do well, but who have jobs and aren't interested. Even more so than when you were competing, there's almost no direct financial motivation to compete in TopCoder algorithm competitions. And, at some point I understand the competition subject matter would become less interesting (over time you're going to see less and less novelty). Fair enough.
However, it's not like the winners are 30 year old Chinese workers who are spending 80 hrs a week practicing so they can make money in programming competitions - it's mostly students from Poland, Russia, and China. There's no reason North American students shouldn't share these students' love of programming or (as your case and so many other cases demonstrate) desire to distinguish themselves to potential employers.
So I'll admit I find it odd, and a tiny bit distressing, that so few North American students are doing well in TopCoder (or in the Google Code Jam). That's not to say there's none, but there's not a lot.
Also consider that a full time staff might very well allow them to raise more money (kinda the point of doing that), such that while the percentage moved to administrative things is now higher, the actual amount available to support their cause is higher.
I think that's where we differ - I don't think this is a good excuse. While I understand charities want to raise more money (and good for them!) I think charitable spending is - to some extent - a zero sum game. For me it definitely is, there's a certain amount I'm going to spend on charities - it's just a matter of finding the ones who'll do the most with it.
So if a charity is getting less efficient in order to get more of my money, they're effectively taking it from a charity that may be more efficient (in terms of translating my money into good) but less visible.
So to me that percentage is extremely important. I don't think charities should run "like a business". That doesn't mean I don't think they should ever pay staff or something - but I do think it means they need to focus on doing the most good for the money they receive, recognizing that there's not an unlimited amount of charitable money out there.
And they do it for a pittance of pay because it's something they care about.
I spend on charity, and almost never do I donate to charities that pay people to call me. I find charities that spend their money on programs, not on fundraising and administration. Some charities attract volunteer callers/canvassers - but a lot of times it's just people doing a job like any other and there's no reason to glorify what they're doing. The net effect of what they do, beyond making a living, is often going to be moving charitable funding from funding programs over to funding administration and fundraising (calling/advertising) costs.
Honestly, many charities are basically a business that produces calls for donation. For example, "Angel Flight West" sounds like a great charity: "Arranging free air transportation in response to health care and other compelling human needs".
Then you see that only 31.1% of donations go towards the actual program and the rest is lost to administration and fundraising costs (link). Now I'm not saying they aren't trying to good work, or that charities in general aren't doing good work - but I do think there's justification at being frustrated with how many charities are run.
To balance out my last example, look at Food For The Poor. 96.8% of their incoming funds goes to the program.
Before flash, the only way you could get guaranteed good-quality motion on an internet movie is by pushing it fully to the client and cacheing it locally before playing (like a Quicktime HD Trailer, something Flash still can't really take on...). Flash players eliminate the local cache, and thus the primary "leak" in the protected content path.
Flash can't guarantee performance any more than the other players did - they all stream the same way: by downloading the video and beginning to play as soon as enough is loaded that it's likely that downloading will outpace viewing.
It's much, much easier to nab a regular flash movie than it was to say, get the stream part of an ASX (or whatever the MS streaming thing was). In general, the "old" ways gave a lot more options in terms of hiding content than Flash does by default (and as it is deployed on common sites).
No - as the guy before said, Flash won because it actually works, and does so consistently. Before Flash video, there was eternal buffering, incompatibility and failure (or at least that's what most users saw).
Just going to chime in with some agreement. I hate it when authors/producers blame their failure on "oh, our show was just too amazingly great for you idiots". I only saw a couple episodes of the Terminator TV show - but what I did see was boring, ham-handed, and a bit self-congratulatory about how special it was.
I don't understand how people watch, say, Halo 3 or Street Fighter (though I love playing Street Fighter).. Certainly there's strategy in those games, but much of it is not apparent in the default view, and is often eclipsed by execution skill that isn't entertaining - at least not after a while.
On the other hand, a game like Starcraft is made to be watched (and many, many people do including myself). With a good observer (and commentator helps too), you can really get a feel for the strategy involved.
I get owned if I play Starcraft online, but I seldom feel any animosity towards the person that beat me. Starcraft is a game where the learning-over-time curve takes a long time to flatten out, and I'm very near the start. I think people who've spent time getting very good at it have been doing something that's satisfying and lot of fun.
"My son sometimes screams his brains out when I change his diaper. It still needs to be done."
Of course, and you do it. Punishing your son for it would be excessive.
My point wasn't anything about punishing. It was about the fact that I'm forcing him to do something that, to an adult, would be a humiliating, cold, unpleasant deprivation of privacy (and a diaper, which perhaps he wanted). My point was just that, obviously, there has to be some leeway for parents in terms of forcing their children to do things. My son cannot make the decision that he wants his diaper changed, however bad it needs to be done.
There will be many things like this that a child can take responsibility for as they grow up, but that will need to be done gradually.
The child running towards the campfire may be handled without violence. It is possible.
Nonviolent parenting != permissive parenting.
Possible, definitely. It's just sometimes the margin of error is low, and sometimes even good, very well-meaning parents do not have an effective teaching relationship with their children. By this I mean they're not able to communicate the importance of certain things - they say "don't go to the fire" and it becomes a game. The consequences of this failure to communicate can be very dire - outweighing, to my mind, the surely traumatic experience of having your parent seem to attack you (and it is only seem, as spanking should never be actually painful).
My kid isn't old enough to do much - but I worry about this myself. I've tried to teach young children before, and had real problems - kids somehow sense something that makes them think they can walk over me (which they then do). I've tried to take different attitudes and postures and learn to be better at this (including by watching some of my family and friends who are much better at this), but it's not an easy skill to improve.
Anyways, I empathize with parents who are dealing with longstanding teaching problems that they aren't able to manage. That said, I don't have sympathy for someone who spanks often, or to punish harmless behaviors (throwing food, yelling, or fighting with other kids). These are things that you can try again on teaching until you get it right. If you fail to communicate that throwing food is bad, it doesn't matter.
All I'm saying is that I don't think we can say "spanking is never acceptable" or "yelling at your kids is never acceptable". Perhaps the need for these things is symptomatic of earlier mistakes, but people make mistakes.
The right to privacy, the right to eat when and however much you want, the right to sleep when you are sleepy and use the bathroom when you are ready, are taken away from you when you are a child
Obviously these are things that need to come in as a child ages. My son sometimes screams his brains out when I change his diaper. It still needs to be done.
Obviously doing the same thing for a 4 year old would involve different considerations (and so on for an 8 year old or adult). Children do need a measure of protection from themselves, and that may involve managing their eating, sleep, and behavior until they can manage it themselves.
Many parents abuse their authority over their children, but as usual it's a question of balance.
Incorrect: "I was spanked as a kid and I turned OK." Correct: "I was spanked as a kid and I grew up to believe that spanking is OK."
I've seen light spanking (or "very angry" tones) used responsibly with very young children (in cases where a dangerous behavior could not be curbed in other ways - things like running towards a campfire). I think it can be OK. I myself was never spanked that I remember.
All in all, I don't think this is nearly as clear as you want it to be.
Another separate issue is the belief that pain not remembered doesn't count. On this I'd imagine we'd agree - I find it incredible that, for example, circumcision is done how it is.
Naturally our tech wouldn't regress - but would it progress? After a trillion years? To what end? Technology is about solving problems. What problems will we have to solve? Why would I make rockets after a million years of making rockets? Sure I could move on to something else... but eventually there wouldn't be any more something elses.
If you write poetry now, why wouldn't you write [better] poetry then?
Have you seen poetry? It's about problems or sin or faith or death or the uncertain future or the past. We'd have none of those, or at least not in any interesting way. Heck, even current songwriters and poets tend to suck it up once they've gotten used to a comfortable life.
Look at what most people do with their time off - and then take away fear of death, novelty, and outright sin. What's left? And the "better" things people do: solve problems, help others, learn, etc... those are all out the window too, or at least they would be after the first million years.
I can imagine another hundred million years of playing games and imagining up new worlds with new tech or exploring the galaxy - but forever? I think it ends the way so many sci-fi novels have ended, with everyone stimulating their pleasure centers and essentially napping for the rest of time.
So why? Why would God create us with the goal of us living pointless lives on an immortal resort? And why would he screw it up and have this interim mess of nastiness and death? And why wouldn't he explain any of this?
Sure it sounds good now to have no problems, but not forever.
Sounds like hell to me - an eternity of boredom. The only way heaven would sound good to me is if there was still some kind of progression or something. After a week at a resort I'm ready to leave - can't imagine spending an eternity on one planet.
No kids? No exploring space and discovering new things (assumedly God knows everything anyways..)? No other metaphysical drama beyond "now God lives with us forever"? Pfft. Rather stay dead.
I love X-Com, but it was one of the very best titles of its era; it's unfair to complain that most new games aren't as innovative or good, because most old games weren't as innovative or good.
And, conversely, most old games weren't as innovative or good as Braid or Portal. In fact, most old games were not as good as a very bad modern game.
And many of the best "old games" weren't innovative either. Super Mario 3, Ultima IV and Star Control II were "just another sequel"s. Starcraft was an evolution on a theme. But they are all shining examples of their genres - and I'd be happy to have more boring sequels if they were of that kind of quality.
98% of games are garbage, but it's got very little to do with innovation dying out - and much more to do with the fact that writing a good game is hard and often doesn't result in more sales than writing a mediocre one.
For most of the games we tried (FPS games, etc), 3d wasn't spectacular. But for racing games, I found the 3d effect (with an eMagin head mounted display) to really make the game better - you got a real sense of speed.
I think the thing that will push this over the top is good head tracking. If your perspective changed with head movement, I think the 3d illusion would be really compelling.
I really hope that wasn't the test in question - there's very few questions there that shouldn't be obvious; just from random pop culture you should be able to get more than half. If I had spent any time learning American history (which I probably would have if I was American), I would assume it would have been even easier.
At my work, we started playing Starcraft at lunch. It was cheap, it's very social (I'm getting to know guys I didn't talk to much before), and it has been great for morale.
Having a micro-managed game console... I mean, I like games, but I would feel like a child turning on my special toy for 15 minutes before bedtime. Whatever good will may have come of this is being squandered by your micro-management.
"Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" was pretty great. After watching it on Blueray, I went back and watched the first bit on DVD.. wasn't nearly the experience.
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For industry/career use, VB.net is perhaps not a top choice - but it is not altogether unused. And, in any case, the important concepts learned in this kind of contest will be language independent.
And, yeah, VB is really easy to teach: great IDE, magically good edit-and-continue, simple debugging options, simple syntax, no worries about object lifetimes, intuitive handling/conversion of strings and integers, and a good set of generic lists, dictionaries, hashtables, etc that are reasonably easy to use...
(Of course, there's still a few real "gotchas" that are likely to come up in a programming competition: no bignums, goofy array syntax, automatic type conversion with division, no short circuiting by default, sometimes unintuitive operator precedence... but nothing that can't be gotten around or debugged through relatively simply).
Will this be as big a hit as Blinx: The Time Sweeper, which had pretty much the same mechanic in a high profile 3d platformer 7 years ago?
I believe the winner competes under the handle of Tourist on TopCoder. He's ranked 14th currently (among competitors of all ages). There is exactly one North American ranked higher than him (ICPC legend and generally amazing Derek Kisman).
And who do I expect to win IOI? An 18 or 19 year old. This is a very prestigious competition, and many of the competitors have been training hard for years. 14 to 18 is a significant age gap and many of his competitors are amazing prodigies in their own right. I find it extremely impressive that he's performed to this level.
Rewriting in assembler would be a very strange strategy from someone who knew anything about algorithms. If I had two programmers, one of them I thought of as a good "designer" and the other I thought of as a good "algorithms programmer", I would trust the latter more to come up with a scalable solution. I would expect a generally bad solution - like rewriting in assembler - to be much more likely to come from someone who had no experience with algorithm competitions.
Writing scalable algorithms to deal with large inputs is a core task for algorithms competitors, and they're forced to understand the difference between "optimizing" and "achieving better asymptotic complexity".
I see plenty of magic numbers in code - but most of them are just arbitrary failures, or sentinels, or tweaked constants. A search engine wouldn't have anything to say about those.
The few magic numbers I could think of that are meaningful - like for example c704dd7b (used in CRC) - are long and widely used enough to already come up with fine results in Google.
...if so, that's garbage. I mean, the prize support is great - but if you're going to take a stab at a big prize like that, you need some time. It seems very likely the winners will be people who were already midway through development.
If their goal is to stimulate new projects and attract broad participation, give a reasonable time frame - at least a few months. Alternatively, if this is a contest that's been open for some time (and it's not immediately obvious from the page linked to) then I take all that back :)
Maybe we should have application challenges where we say "write the easiest to use calculator" :)
There is. TopCoder holds contests for application design, development, architecture, specification, and graphic design. These contests are used to develop real applications (rather than just for contest sake, like the algorithm competitions) so they actually pay reasonably well too.
It could just be that the US coders are no longer interested.
It's certainly likely that there's a lot of US coders who could do well, but who have jobs and aren't interested. Even more so than when you were competing, there's almost no direct financial motivation to compete in TopCoder algorithm competitions. And, at some point I understand the competition subject matter would become less interesting (over time you're going to see less and less novelty). Fair enough.
However, it's not like the winners are 30 year old Chinese workers who are spending 80 hrs a week practicing so they can make money in programming competitions - it's mostly students from Poland, Russia, and China. There's no reason North American students shouldn't share these students' love of programming or (as your case and so many other cases demonstrate) desire to distinguish themselves to potential employers.
So I'll admit I find it odd, and a tiny bit distressing, that so few North American students are doing well in TopCoder (or in the Google Code Jam). That's not to say there's none, but there's not a lot.
Also consider that a full time staff might very well allow them to raise more money (kinda the point of doing that), such that while the percentage moved to administrative things is now higher, the actual amount available to support their cause is higher.
I think that's where we differ - I don't think this is a good excuse. While I understand charities want to raise more money (and good for them!) I think charitable spending is - to some extent - a zero sum game. For me it definitely is, there's a certain amount I'm going to spend on charities - it's just a matter of finding the ones who'll do the most with it.
So if a charity is getting less efficient in order to get more of my money, they're effectively taking it from a charity that may be more efficient (in terms of translating my money into good) but less visible.
So to me that percentage is extremely important. I don't think charities should run "like a business". That doesn't mean I don't think they should ever pay staff or something - but I do think it means they need to focus on doing the most good for the money they receive, recognizing that there's not an unlimited amount of charitable money out there.
And they do it for a pittance of pay because it's something they care about.
I spend on charity, and almost never do I donate to charities that pay people to call me. I find charities that spend their money on programs, not on fundraising and administration. Some charities attract volunteer callers/canvassers - but a lot of times it's just people doing a job like any other and there's no reason to glorify what they're doing. The net effect of what they do, beyond making a living, is often going to be moving charitable funding from funding programs over to funding administration and fundraising (calling/advertising) costs.
Honestly, many charities are basically a business that produces calls for donation. For example, "Angel Flight West" sounds like a great charity: "Arranging free air transportation in response to health care and other compelling human needs".
Then you see that only 31.1% of donations go towards the actual program and the rest is lost to administration and fundraising costs (link). Now I'm not saying they aren't trying to good work, or that charities in general aren't doing good work - but I do think there's justification at being frustrated with how many charities are run.
To balance out my last example, look at Food For The Poor. 96.8% of their incoming funds goes to the program.
Before flash, the only way you could get guaranteed good-quality motion on an internet movie is by pushing it fully to the client and cacheing it locally before playing (like a Quicktime HD Trailer, something Flash still can't really take on...). Flash players eliminate the local cache, and thus the primary "leak" in the protected content path.
Flash can't guarantee performance any more than the other players did - they all stream the same way: by downloading the video and beginning to play as soon as enough is loaded that it's likely that downloading will outpace viewing.
It's much, much easier to nab a regular flash movie than it was to say, get the stream part of an ASX (or whatever the MS streaming thing was). In general, the "old" ways gave a lot more options in terms of hiding content than Flash does by default (and as it is deployed on common sites).
No - as the guy before said, Flash won because it actually works, and does so consistently. Before Flash video, there was eternal buffering, incompatibility and failure (or at least that's what most users saw).
Just going to chime in with some agreement. I hate it when authors/producers blame their failure on "oh, our show was just too amazingly great for you idiots". I only saw a couple episodes of the Terminator TV show - but what I did see was boring, ham-handed, and a bit self-congratulatory about how special it was.
I don't understand how people watch, say, Halo 3 or Street Fighter (though I love playing Street Fighter).. Certainly there's strategy in those games, but much of it is not apparent in the default view, and is often eclipsed by execution skill that isn't entertaining - at least not after a while.
On the other hand, a game like Starcraft is made to be watched (and many, many people do including myself). With a good observer (and commentator helps too), you can really get a feel for the strategy involved.
I get owned if I play Starcraft online, but I seldom feel any animosity towards the person that beat me. Starcraft is a game where the learning-over-time curve takes a long time to flatten out, and I'm very near the start. I think people who've spent time getting very good at it have been doing something that's satisfying and lot of fun.
"My son sometimes screams his brains out when I change his diaper. It still needs to be done."
Of course, and you do it. Punishing your son for it would be excessive.
My point wasn't anything about punishing. It was about the fact that I'm forcing him to do something that, to an adult, would be a humiliating, cold, unpleasant deprivation of privacy (and a diaper, which perhaps he wanted). My point was just that, obviously, there has to be some leeway for parents in terms of forcing their children to do things. My son cannot make the decision that he wants his diaper changed, however bad it needs to be done.
There will be many things like this that a child can take responsibility for as they grow up, but that will need to be done gradually.
The child running towards the campfire may be handled without violence. It is possible.
Nonviolent parenting != permissive parenting.
Possible, definitely. It's just sometimes the margin of error is low, and sometimes even good, very well-meaning parents do not have an effective teaching relationship with their children. By this I mean they're not able to communicate the importance of certain things - they say "don't go to the fire" and it becomes a game. The consequences of this failure to communicate can be very dire - outweighing, to my mind, the surely traumatic experience of having your parent seem to attack you (and it is only seem, as spanking should never be actually painful).
My kid isn't old enough to do much - but I worry about this myself. I've tried to teach young children before, and had real problems - kids somehow sense something that makes them think they can walk over me (which they then do). I've tried to take different attitudes and postures and learn to be better at this (including by watching some of my family and friends who are much better at this), but it's not an easy skill to improve.
Anyways, I empathize with parents who are dealing with longstanding teaching problems that they aren't able to manage. That said, I don't have sympathy for someone who spanks often, or to punish harmless behaviors (throwing food, yelling, or fighting with other kids). These are things that you can try again on teaching until you get it right. If you fail to communicate that throwing food is bad, it doesn't matter.
All I'm saying is that I don't think we can say "spanking is never acceptable" or "yelling at your kids is never acceptable". Perhaps the need for these things is symptomatic of earlier mistakes, but people make mistakes.
The right to privacy, the right to eat when and however much you want, the right to sleep when you are sleepy and use the bathroom when you are ready, are taken away from you when you are a child
Obviously these are things that need to come in as a child ages. My son sometimes screams his brains out when I change his diaper. It still needs to be done.
Obviously doing the same thing for a 4 year old would involve different considerations (and so on for an 8 year old or adult). Children do need a measure of protection from themselves, and that may involve managing their eating, sleep, and behavior until they can manage it themselves.
Many parents abuse their authority over their children, but as usual it's a question of balance.
Incorrect: "I was spanked as a kid and I turned OK."
Correct: "I was spanked as a kid and I grew up to believe that spanking is OK."
I've seen light spanking (or "very angry" tones) used responsibly with very young children (in cases where a dangerous behavior could not be curbed in other ways - things like running towards a campfire). I think it can be OK. I myself was never spanked that I remember.
All in all, I don't think this is nearly as clear as you want it to be.
Another separate issue is the belief that pain not remembered doesn't count. On this I'd imagine we'd agree - I find it incredible that, for example, circumcision is done how it is.
Naturally our tech wouldn't regress - but would it progress? After a trillion years? To what end? Technology is about solving problems. What problems will we have to solve? Why would I make rockets after a million years of making rockets? Sure I could move on to something else... but eventually there wouldn't be any more something elses.
If you write poetry now, why wouldn't you write [better] poetry then?
Have you seen poetry? It's about problems or sin or faith or death or the uncertain future or the past. We'd have none of those, or at least not in any interesting way. Heck, even current songwriters and poets tend to suck it up once they've gotten used to a comfortable life.
Look at what most people do with their time off - and then take away fear of death, novelty, and outright sin. What's left? And the "better" things people do: solve problems, help others, learn, etc... those are all out the window too, or at least they would be after the first million years.
I can imagine another hundred million years of playing games and imagining up new worlds with new tech or exploring the galaxy - but forever? I think it ends the way so many sci-fi novels have ended, with everyone stimulating their pleasure centers and essentially napping for the rest of time.
So why? Why would God create us with the goal of us living pointless lives on an immortal resort? And why would he screw it up and have this interim mess of nastiness and death? And why wouldn't he explain any of this?
Sure it sounds good now to have no problems, but not forever.
Sounds like hell to me - an eternity of boredom. The only way heaven would sound good to me is if there was still some kind of progression or something. After a week at a resort I'm ready to leave - can't imagine spending an eternity on one planet.
No kids? No exploring space and discovering new things (assumedly God knows everything anyways..)? No other metaphysical drama beyond "now God lives with us forever"? Pfft. Rather stay dead.
I love X-Com, but it was one of the very best titles of its era; it's unfair to complain that most new games aren't as innovative or good, because most old games weren't as innovative or good.
And, conversely, most old games weren't as innovative or good as Braid or Portal. In fact, most old games were not as good as a very bad modern game.
And many of the best "old games" weren't innovative either. Super Mario 3, Ultima IV and Star Control II were "just another sequel"s. Starcraft was an evolution on a theme. But they are all shining examples of their genres - and I'd be happy to have more boring sequels if they were of that kind of quality.
98% of games are garbage, but it's got very little to do with innovation dying out - and much more to do with the fact that writing a good game is hard and often doesn't result in more sales than writing a mediocre one.
For most of the games we tried (FPS games, etc), 3d wasn't spectacular. But for racing games, I found the 3d effect (with an eMagin head mounted display) to really make the game better - you got a real sense of speed.
I think the thing that will push this over the top is good head tracking. If your perspective changed with head movement, I think the 3d illusion would be really compelling.
Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control II, but free)
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (great role-based strategic shooter, inexplicably free)
I really hope that wasn't the test in question - there's very few questions there that shouldn't be obvious; just from random pop culture you should be able to get more than half. If I had spent any time learning American history (which I probably would have if I was American), I would assume it would have been even easier.
At my work, we started playing Starcraft at lunch. It was cheap, it's very social (I'm getting to know guys I didn't talk to much before), and it has been great for morale.
Having a micro-managed game console... I mean, I like games, but I would feel like a child turning on my special toy for 15 minutes before bedtime. Whatever good will may have come of this is being squandered by your micro-management.
In Jack's defense - how could he have seen the Acheron in the fog without high definition and great shadow detail?
"Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" was pretty great. After watching it on Blueray, I went back and watched the first bit on DVD .. wasn't nearly the experience.