Geek Olympics Code for Gold

Haydn Fenton writes "Wired has a recent article on the16th annual IOI (that's International Olympiad in Informatics), taking place in Athens from Sept 11th to Sept 18th. The 304 programmers from 80 countries will be competing in 7 marathon programming sessions to determine the world's fastest coder. The computers are being supplied by Altec and contestants will have a choice of using either Windows XP or RedHat 9.0. More information can be found on the IOI Website."

No MacOS X?

[laird]

A programming contest that doesn't include MacOS X? Crazy! All of the best engineers I know have been moving to MacOS X as their native platform ever since MacOS X 10.2. It lets you use all those wonderful open source tools, and still have a nice friendly GUI, and work on a beautiful laptop, all at once. It's a thing of beauty.

And Apple's development tools rock!

Code fast or Fast Code?

[rexguo]

Personally, I think fast code is more important than coding fast. But that's because I work in the real-time media industry..

Automated Scoring

[bluelip]

TFA states the programs will be automatically scored on characteristics including 'elegance'. How can one program judge the elegance of another?

Live Boardcasting?

[4cop2c]

What will it like if there is live boardcasting?

Re:Hold up...

[Paladin144]

No, thanks. I'll take the quality olympics.

And which one would that be? The one with all the doping scandals and judging fiascos? The one that gave the corporations huge concessions such as making blogging illegal [cnn.com] for athletes?

The Olympics are full of crap.

...except for beach volleyball - that was cool.

Why no G5s?

[Cow007]

Any particular reason that Apple isn't represented? I think that the competition might be a bit more competitive if the G5 was available.

Excellent contest for employers...

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can know who NOT to hire. A good, employable coder is someone who works well in a team, writes code that can be easily taken up by another coder if necessary, and does not show up the rest of the team in an effort to be "#1". The people going for these olympics have pretty much the exact opposite of every employable skill I look for.

Re:Because default install isn't enough

[iamatlas]

10.3 comes with an older version of Xcode (1.0 I think). The newest version (1.5 I think) has to be downloaded from Apple's website, requring a free-but-time-consuming Developer Online Membership.

Version number questions. Many OS X users are still hanging on to 10.2.x because it's almost as fast and almost as good looking as 10.3.x. Many are waiting for 10.4 Tiger, and some developers are already using developer seeds of 10.4.

How are these issues different than coding with any flavor of Linux? I know my machines don't (always) have the most current kernel, or the newest ide. Why? Because of the stability of known and proven software. This results in having to download and install things when I want to upgrade or customize one of my systems, exactly like you'd have to do with OS X to get X11 or the newest Xcode. (Or XP, for that matter- what develpoment tools are in XP pro by default? Less than OS X, certainly)

Besides, I think it's safe to say that the machines being used are going to be setup using disk images to ensure uniformity, something that can be done on a PPC just as easily.

My guess is they're not using OS X because of the hardware differnces and the way these differences could skew the results, or give even an appearance of unfairness. Standardize the hardware, let the programmer choose the OS, and they have only themselves to blame if (when) explorer.exe crashes or if (never) the kernel panics.

Re:Automated Scoring

[AHumbleOpinion]

It might be related to how programs determine the complexity of code, elegance may be strongly correlated with simplicity. One definition of complexity is to count the number of operands and operators used to perform some task.

Re:No MacOS X?

[Chess_the_cat]

Anecdotes mean jack shit. Testimonials are quite useful.

Re:Because default install isn't enough

[edalytical]

And the default install for XP does include all the goodies that a developer wants. Last time I checked XP didn't come with development tools.

My guess is they have to use the same hardware so no one has unfair speed advantage during a development compile. i.e. for debugging or a test run. And no I didn't read the article.

Re:Because default install isn't enough

[cyclobotomy]

My guess is they're not supporting it because the default install of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther doesn't yet include all of the goodies that developers want.

Anyone who has the skills to program also has the skills to select a few checkboxes in an installer.

Re:Yey Baby!

[renehollan]

The IOC has stupid rules that restrict the maximum amount of cover that a beach vollyball outfit can provide for female Olympic competitors. As in: "the width of the material covering the thigh shall not exceed so many centimeters."

Given that the skimpiness of the outfit has little to do with the performance of the athlete, many women have protested that this is blatant sexual objectification. I agree.

Of course the IOC is driven, like many organizations, by profit, and hence advertising dollars, and thus wants to attract as many eyeballs to the events as possible. Most of us guys like to watch women wearing skimpy outfits. Sex sells. Thus, the rules.

I do think, however, that this goes against the Olympic spirit of competition in sports, though. The IOC shouldn't be in the business of selling sex, but rather world-class sports.

Re:No MacOS X?

[Haeleth]

Anecdotes mean jack shit. Testimonials are quite useful.

A testimonial IS an anecdote. A page of testimonials is a page of anecdotes with the negative ones filtered out, thereby removing any possible balance or objectivity that the full set of anecdotes might have been able to provide.

In what sense is that useful, other than to the people marketing the product in question?