Hmm, Kim Il Sung University is ranked 30th. Didn't know NK sent students to ACM ICPC.
2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
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Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#32Can someone explain the significance of this competition? I've never heard of it before and am just looking for a little understanding of what, if anything, there is to read into the results.
People do it for fun and bragging rights. It looks good on the resume, especially if the person reading the resume has been to that kind of competitions too.
So it's taken seriously by universities? Like CalTech really put its best foot forward and got smoked by UCF? And American Universities really are doing this poorly in CS competitions relative to the rest of the world?
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#33Can someone explain the significance of this competition? I've never heard of it before and am just looking for a little understanding of what, if anything, there is to read into the results.
Competitive Programming is a sport where teams(or individuals in some instances) compete with each other to solve a set of algorithmic questions in the shortest time. This generally happens on a system called the Online Judge which is basically a system for code evaluation. ACM ICPC is basically the Olympics of Competitive Programming. The significance can vary from person to person but sometimes Universities and Com…
So, like the olympics, the important member organizations put a reasonable enough amount of effort into it to ensure they're represented well? Like, I really should be looking at UCF as a college that produces some of the best programmers in the US?
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#34I look at these rankings, and can't help but notice that it's basically whatever school has a club that really cares. Looking at the American schools, no one is going to rank the computer science program at the Illinois Institute of Technology above the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#35Why 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 believe that it is because of two reasons [massive generalization follows...] (1) emphasis on math and physics (2) stress on discipline and rote learning. US students have (1), Chinese have (2), Russians have both. You would realize that most competitors in these contests end up doing pattern matching with previously solved problems. In addition, they keep a catalogue of most asked questions, common codebase, etc.…
Once you have solved your first 1000 problems in programming competition situations, you become really good at writing code that compiles and even is correct in the first go.
For me, practicing for programming competitions alongside the job as a software library maintainer really boosted my C++ skills faster than anything else could have.
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#36Problem H was apparently not popular at all. Something special about it ?
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#37Problem H was apparently not popular at all. Something special about it ?
I'd say so. It looks pretty. .. unappetizing: https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2016.pdf
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#38Why 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.
Strong tradition of STEM education, back from the Soviet times. Military complex was very strong in the USSR, which resulted in quality education (again, just STEM, not so in humanities) - basically, you need to know physics and maths very well to build the bomb. I guess that applies to other Eastern bloc countries to some extent (see Polish universities at ##5, 9 and 25, Ukraine at #11, Belarus at #17).
In case of Poland it helps that algorithm competitions are popular in high school. Each year top winners get a free pass to entry any CS university. So if you SAT style exams are not your thing there is an alternative way.
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
People do it for fun and bragging rights. It looks good on the resume, especially if the person reading the resume has been to that kind of competitions too.
So it's taken seriously by universities? Like CalTech really put its best foot forward and got smoked by UCF? And American Universities really are doing this poorly in CS competitions relative to the rest of the world?
It depends. The admissions committee at Caltech might care if a PhD candidate from another country won the contest.
However, Caltech itself doesn't care that much about its team's performance.
Re: 2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard
#40Why 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?
Memorization of algorithms.
In addition, programming competitions always seems to have an overabundance of Computational Geometry problems which are really hard if you have never seen them before but relatively straightforward if you know the correct algorithm off the top of your head.
I prefer to see the "head-to-head" competitions over some competitive task than these. Sometimes, a simple but clever hack does better than advanced algorithmic programming (and sometimes not).