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A new edX course [1] was announced few days ago, which is created by SPb ITMO (which finished 7th this year). [1] https://www.edx.org/course/how-win-coding-competitions-secre...
A new edX course [1] was announced few days ago, which is created by SPb ITMO (which finished 7th this year). [1] https://www.edx.org/course/how-win-coding-competitions-secre...
The course is an introductory course, suitable only for beginners. Do you know any good resource for intermediate-level programmers?
Why are Russians so historically good at these competitions? China have raw numbers, America has the resources/ecosystems to train and prepare these programmers. Russia seems to have neither and regularly outperform both nations.
Why are Russians so historically good at these competitions? China have raw numbers, America has the resources/ecosystems to train and prepare these programmers. Russia seems to have neither and regularly outperform both nations.
On interesting thing to note is the ACM World Final ranking usually doesn't correlate perfectly with perceived ranking of the school, even the ranking of its CS department.
Another point is, ACM is fun, but if you purposefully train for it, you reach the point of diminishing return quickly. Being a former Olympiad in Informatics contestant (high school equivalent of ACM), I find these kind of competition absolutely not helpful in real world programming. It does help me pass the interviews.
In China at least, ACM is perceived a way to prove oneself to potential graduate schools in America and employers. And I do know employers give very high priority to these students - even Google.
So, the reason the Chinese is good at it is mostly, this is not a hobby, but a high stake exam. It is a way to land at prestigious graduate program or job.
Why isn't the US, and why aren't top universities doing as well as we may think they would be? Because they have better options than ACM.
However, I really haven't applied much of what I learned doing the problems to "real" work. It's cool to see methods of looking at things differently, but just doesn't translate well to software development.
I did a competitive programming course in undergrad, these problems are really interesting if you're not familiar with it. I highly recommend folks try a few problems and look at the solutions. It can be really eye-opening. However, I really haven't applied much of what I learned doing the problems to "real" work. It's cool to see methods of looking at things differently, but just doesn't translate well to software d…
A bit of background about ICPC, for those who don't know: It's a team competition. You have 3 contestants on a team, but only one computer on which to write, test and submit your code. Most of the work of solving a problem is usually done in your brain or on paper, so typically, one person will be coding at a time while the other two think about problems and get ready to rotate to the keyboard.
But although the primary scoring criterion is number of problems solved, you also get penalized for time taken and incorrect attempts. So it's really important to be able to glance over someone else's shoulder and notice things like "oh, there's an off-by-one error in that loop condition" or "you forgot about such-and-such an edge case".
Why are Russians so historically good at these competitions? China have raw numbers, America has the resources/ecosystems to train and prepare these programmers. Russia seems to have neither and regularly outperform both nations.
I don't think raw number explains the Chinese performance. India has a comparable population, arguably better positioned to do well in ACM (English-speaking country with a strong IT sector). However you don't see many Indian universities here. On interesting thing to note is the ACM World Final ranking usually doesn't correlate perfectly with perceived ranking of the school, even the ranking of its CS department. Ano…
Why are Russians so historically good at these competitions? China have raw numbers, America has the resources/ecosystems to train and prepare these programmers. Russia seems to have neither and regularly outperform both nations.
I know that St. Petersburg ITMO university specifically trains their student to compete at ACM contests to far greater extent than US schools.
I have always found a lack of books on advanced things that I've encountered in competitive programming like Fenwick trees, link-cut trees, rmq etc. Can anybody recommend book(s) that contain these things?
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=503...