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29th ACM Intl. Programming Contest Results
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 07, 2005 09:56 AM
from the -talent-recognized dept.
from the -talent-recognized dept.
mathinator writes "The 29th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, hosted by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, are now over and the results are in.
Congratulations to the top 4 teams who will be walking away with gold medals. They are Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State University, St. Petersburg Institute of Optics and Mechanics, and Canada's University of Waterloo (coming in at 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively. The top 4 get gold medals).
Regional champions are: University of Waterloo, Canada (North America); Moscow State University, Russia (Europe); University of Cape Town, South Africa, (Africa and the Middle East); Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica, Brazil (Latin America); Shanghai Jiaotong University, China (Asia); and University of New South Wales, Australia (South Pacific)."
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prostoalex writes "2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is over with Warsaw University (Poland) winning it this year and solving all of the problems. The runner-up, Tsinghua University (China), finished with 7 problems solved, while St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are tied up for the third place with 6 problems solved. There were 6000 teams initially in the running, and in the final round of the competition only 88 remained."
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Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it the lack of quality programs these days or lack of interest on the part of highly talented students to participate?
Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, the results of a single competition is hardly any reason to pass judgement on CS students nationwide.
Parent
Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:5, Interesting)
- Knowing how to program fast and flawlessly
- Knowing a lot of data structures, and knowning how to choose the right one for a problem (mainly trees, tries, hash tables, vectors, linked lists, graphs and ocasionally special data structures for geometrical data)
- Knowing how to solve some classical problems, mainly in dynamic programming and graphs, where a lot of problems are used again and again in those contests (though with variations or presented in an obsfucated way).
I'd say that the first two are indicators of knowing how to program well. The third one is more discussible, since there are a lot of schools which prepare their contestants to know those algorithms by heart... I'm not saying they don't understand them, but that component alone doesn't show much ability to me
Parent
Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I also happen to be from Russia, and I can say that in general education system there is more thorough and more focused on the science than here in US (I went to schools in US too). Here all schools seem to be doing is try to make students comfortable, they have a hundreds of clubs and activities for after school. Everyone and their little brother wants to play sports or play in the band first then study. Schools try to be fun, instead of trying to make student learn something usefull. I remember coming to this country and doing my sophomore grade in fairly good high school, but I had to take calculus with the graduating seniors and I remember tutoring them in math even though I was an average student at home in that subject.
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Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:3, Informative)
No Mountain Dew (Score:5, Funny)
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Pride and Hard work. (Score:3)
I can't speak for MIT or the other teams that went, but I have participated in the regional contests several times before, and for us it was something that we did in our spare time. Our only preperation was three local contests through-out the year and at most a couple days before each contest practicing problems. I'm sure that the US teams going to internationals a lot spend more time than that, but I don't
Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Wow, no US teams placed! (Score:3, Informative)
That's not true. The way the contest works is the world is broken up into regions. The people who place first and second at regionals (and occasionally a few honorable mentions) are allowed to move on to the international competition.
Here are the regions for North America [baylor.edu], and here are the list of teams [baylor.edu] that went to compete in the international competition - 11 North Amer
Attitude (Score:3, Insightful)
UWaterloo (Score:3, Informative)
What this shows is that... (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting tidbit (Score:3, Interesting)
Do the problems relate to real life? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look pretty realistic to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the host placing first may seem a bit suspicious, but the other universities in the top four certainly lend some credibility to it.
I've worked with a number of russion developers which have come from those universities and they were quite brilliant. It seems they actually teach math and physics there, what a concept!
I personally rate the University of Waterloo (in Canada) the top computer science university in North America. Yes high profile places like MIT have some brilliant people, but I've found the University of Waterloo has the most consistant quality of graduates. If you look at the accomplishments of Waterloo grads it pretty impressive. Research In Motion (Blackberries) are probably the most well known company founded by UofW grads, but there are lots of others which are also very impressive. Thier policy on requiring LOTS of real world experience for the degree and work/research opportunities in there technology park also gives lots of great experiance.
I've found UofW grads aren't those "fresh out of college" types who have some book knowledge, but not much practical experience. They tend to walk out after graduating ready to REALLY contribute instead of needing a lot of "mentoring" which most fresh grads need (I know I did).
Re:Look pretty realistic to me (Score:3, Interesting)
To address your very last point about not being 'fresh out of college' types, I believe this is mostly due to our co-op program. The vast majority of CS graduates went through the co-op program which over 5 years includes 6 terms (2 full years) of work experience. Luckily most positions, especially for upper year students, are industry development positions. First year students usually end up doing tech support or some such w
Re:Look pretty realistic to me (Score:4, Informative)
University of Waterloo is THE top school in Canada according to Maclaens and is THE top University in Canada for Engineering + CS. The University has the largest Co-op education service in the world. All engineering students and CS students have Co-op every other term. I'm on my co-op term right now. The University's main goal as of now is to ready its students for the work force. We gain 2 years work experience by the time we graduate.
The University is very young (I think found in 1957) and has rapidly grown because of its connections with companies like RIM and COM DEV. Our Chancellor is the President of RIM! RIM Headquarters is next door to us. Across the street we have the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Also, UW is the recruiting ground for M$ (maybe we all hate them, but meh). A lot of the top engineers and programmers in Canada come from UW and end up in the states due to nice offers and oppurtunities. We call that the "Brain Drain."
UW DOES NOT have courses or teachings that are directed towards contests. The courses are extemely rigourous with high expectations. All courses force a lot of critical thinking. We take Math and Science seriously here.
UW conducts nationwide math, physics, and chem contests to high schoolers as well. In Engineering you have to write an entrance math test (which most people fail, but its Bell Curved). If your below standards, they offer mandatory math tutorial services to you. We also recently placed 4th in PUTNAM math comepetition.
Also, addressing the jokes about US being beaten by Canada: Canada has played important roles in science and engineering. Especially since the layed off workers from the Arrow project worked on NASA's Mercury and Apollo missions. That's right, it's our engineers and scientists that helped US get to the Moon. The Arrow project in itself is a great feat for Canada. Arrow was for more advanced than any US aircraft for very long time.
Currently, UW is looking towards raising funds and improving our Graduate programs to become top notch like MIT. We are also investing quite a lot of money to bring top professors in. UW is already good enough to be treated like an Ivy League school in my opinion. However, once we do invest in research I can garantee 50 years from now it will be well known and respected Internationally.
O, by the way...I'm an American :P.
Parent
Woo Waterloo!! (Score:5, Informative)
As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look [baylor.edu] at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).
As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here [baylor.edu].
I competed once... (Score:4, Informative)
oh and honorable mention means you didn't solve any. Take that Tech!
-Brian
Re:I competed once... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what I liked about the programming contest (I was on Michigan State University's team in '92 and '94, going on to the Finals in '94). Virtually every
What surprises me (Score:5, Funny)
It's obvious to me that these "computer scientists" aren't skilled for the real world and will never get a respectable IT job.
Re:What surprises me (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor poor USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Now all I see is people saying: "The Contest isn't representative", "The Metrics are poor", "The problems are academic", and "I wouldn't judge the state of CS curricula based on a contest"
That's all find and good - as long as you sleep better tonight.
But you still didn't place.
Re:Poor poor USA (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is, the top 20 positions could have been taken by US teams, and you know what?
I still didn't place.
If I had managed first post, mine would have been "Cue the nationalist chest beating and excuse making now."
Nationalism sucks.
Let's be honest... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm American, and love my country, but we have to face facts. U.S. society doesn't place a lot of value on academic knowledge, compared to the rest of the world. Our cultural heroes aren't scientists, academics, and thinkers -- they are entertainers and athletes. We respect practicality, and making money, not intellectual understanding. Our society has a longstanding democratic suspicion of elites, including intellectual elites, which often shows up as a disdain for 'impractical' academics. There are several examples of this cultural disdain in the responses to this topic (taking the form of, "who cares, it has no relevance to the practical realm of real-world programming/software engineering."
You can argue about whether or not this disdain for intellectual mastery is good, but the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world where the theory of evolution isn't widely accepted. Perhaps our culture's disdain for and mistrust of elites has a real price, and this contest is one place it shows up? Perhaps it also encourages many of the brightest students to go into areas where they can make money -- law, medical, or business school -- rather than academia?
Re:Wow im amazed (Score:5, Funny)
You'll find that to be the case with most CS depts. You'll need to study law if you want to screw people.
Parent
Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, maybe they solved more problems in less time.
(The above is of course just a theory. It could be a global conspiracy against America).
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Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:3, Informative)
List of problems (Score:4, Informative)
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Finals Problem Set (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:5, Interesting)
For what it's worth, that problem was "Given a list of latitude and longitude points on the surface of Mars, which has radius R, what is the minimum total length of cable needed to connect those points to form a network, if the cable is 1m above the planet's surface? Assume that Mars is spherical."
To this day, I have no idea what the "correct" answer was that took several hundred more meters of cable than our solution did.
Parent
Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:5, Interesting)
Overall I don't put much stock in the results because it's really more of a contest about robotic perfectionism. Unlike what people might expect there is extremely little creativity or problem-solving involved; each team has huge books of problems that they laboriously solve over and over again and there are never any fundamentally new problems in the competitions. I mean not like they could come up with an entirely new type of problem for each questions, but they always follow the same pattern: each problem has 1 fundamental approach you have to use (dynamic programming, graph-coloring, pattern-matching, monte-carlo) and then it's solved. Combine that with not telling any clues about why the program failed and it's really geared towards more robotic programmers. I got out of it precisely because there was virtually no creativity or thinking involved at all, at the professional level.
Also it's virtually impossible to detect cheating... if you watch these people, they basically start coding right from the start anyway so if you already knew the problem and solution there would be little difference to see, it would just look like that team was really good. Or maybe you see test data, or somebody elbows you and says 'be sure to check for 0,0 on the mars problem'.
A much better approach was done on topcode.com [topcoder.com]... there you get to see the test data and why your program failed. Then afterwards other contestants get to look at your code for a while and purposely try to break it with their own (valid) test cases. And you get bonus points for breaking other people's programs.
Parent
Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:3, Funny)
Just kidding. The judges sound like mid-level management candidates.
Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:5, Insightful)
I sure hope I misunderstood you there: do you mean to suggest that "a fair test of programming skill" could not possibly have a winner from an Islamic state? Just so we're clear on this, I don't know whether this competition is fair or not (other posters seem to think not) but why would religion have anything to do with it?
Parent
Some religions are hostile to technology. (Score:3, Interesting)
And I'm not hostile to Islam -- I once shouted "Allahu akbar!" during rush hour at the intersection of Lawrence and Homestead. (I admit, mainly because I thought it was a subversive act.)
Re:Funny stuff about this contest... (Score:4, Insightful)
One reason I can think of is because they really are better now. Don't forget, there hasn't been any good reason to study computer science in the US for a while now, unless you _enjoy_ flipping burgers of course. On the other hand, the countries to which all that work is outsourced have a strong need to produce more and more competent programmers. The result is a loss of competence in the US, in favor of those other countries.
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Not so sad? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not so sad? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not a single U.S. school (Score:3, Interesting)
I havent read the article due to slashdotting but something like a programming competition seems very odd. I'm not sure how you could objectively measure something like this, and even if you could; as a programmer I can say that the most important quality to have is imagination or innovation, not the ability to sling the technically best code.
Re:Not a single U.S. school (Score:5, Informative)
I did the competition in 2001 when I was in college. It may be slightly different now, but back then each team of 3 students got 9 problems and an hour to code solutions on one machine. You submitted your code to a server and it compiled it and ran it against unknown input and output (we knew the parameters, but not the actual input). Success/failure notices, or compilation errors were quickly IM'd back to you.
The team is scored using this criteria
1. Number of problems solved
2. The total time taken before submitting correct answers + any penalty minutes for submitting incorrect or incompilable code.
So a team who got 9 questions right in a half hour would score better than a team who got 9 right in 45 minutes.
(As for how we did, we were able to solve 4/9 questions and tied for 17th place. Results here [baylor.edu]. I was on the American University team, AU One)
Parent
Re:Not a single U.S. school (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a single U.S. school (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a single U.S. school (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, with the rules that are in place from the school and the board of regents for the state colleges, there isn't a lot of incentives that can be given to students to participate in something like this. I talked with a member of the Waterloo team and they were getting a couple of class credits for being on the team, which is something our school couldn't give. It wasn'
Re:Individual Efforts (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:programming is a labor job (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Coding is blue collar (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, there are some mental challenges in programming, but for most part, it's straight forward (especially object based programming)
Those are not straightforward programming contests, they're algorithmic oriented contests.
here are real geniouses out there that can code in assembler, etc, but for most part, coding is like any other labor job.
It
Re:Coding is blue collar (Score:5, Insightful)
If programming is like coal mining, can you do a PhD in Coal Mining too?
You, sir, seem to misunderstand what programming is about. Programming is not jotting down some if statements, for loops and the like - any 9 year old can do that after having reading a bit through Learn C++ in 21 days and in the development cycle of a program, it is probably the least time-intensive part.
But defining the problem you're tackling, designing your solution, your strategy, your algorithms, indeed the program itself (and yes, this includes the OO Paradigm - you don't seriously think the OO Paradigm is a funky thing where everything just works automagically with zip effort?) takes up at least half the total development time and it is not "some mental challenge with most part labour", it is purely a mental challenge. The most important tools of a programmer are a pencil and (lots of) paper. After the design is finished, you spend another significant amount of time deciding how to best implement your design. And yes, all of this is important and this is what they teach CS students at universities - or did you think it was all about different ways of writing a while loop? The better your design, the less time you will spend debugging your program (another substantial part of the development cycle of a program and another purely mental task once you've ironed out the compiler errors due to typos).
So don't diss it till you've done it - you clearly haven't.
Parent
Re:Bottom Line ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're still looking for excuses, consider that the programming languages used were probably based in English.
Oh, also consider that a Canadian team placed.
Jiao Tong won fair and square (Score:4, Informative)
ACM ICPC is an American organization, and they have complete control over the judging. IBM supplied the hardware and the ICPC staff supplied the software and judging staff.
In the last hour, any of the 4 gold medallists could have won. Waterloo submitted problem A but didn't get it. The Russian teams submitted problem G but didn't get it. Jiao Tong overcame a 1-problem deficit and then, with about 10 minutes to go, solved problem D to win.
Have a look at the problems and you can decide for yourself whether or not they catered to any particular audience. I think not.
I congratulate Jiao Tong and thank them for their hospitality.
Gordon Cormack
coach,
Waterloo
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Re:no US team has ever placed (Score:5, Informative)
You can see past winners here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/default.htm [baylor.edu]
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