51–55 of 55 posts
I organized these for freshmen at my school. Reading through these comments we had small chance of getting to these levels since other places offered competitive programming courses.
There's actually a study group where the winner team and number of older contestants rotate to talk.
P.S. Link [Ukrainian] for anyone interested http://mycollege.org.ua/
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?
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? 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…
You don't need to memorize them. You can have some amount of printouts with you, which teams usually use for having a bugfree implementation of stuff like arbitrary graph matching, maximum matching of lowest cost, 2SAT or just Gauss elimination.
At the same time these advanced algorithms do not get used very often -- in the 2 finals I took part in we've used something from out printouts maybe once.
In the US, the smarter students don't generally waste their time with these programming competitions. Grades, research, and extra credit would matter more towards a student's academic success. These contests generally appeal more to "hobbyists" or those who have nothing better to do with their time, and so you get biased results.
Earlier 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?
When I was at nearby USF, our programming contest teams were student-run. It's not a priority for the department and there is a lot of inconsistency as students come and go. There's also a smaller pool of participants to draw from. We did reasonably well for a little while when I was there and put a bunch of time into it, recruiting, teaching, running practices with and without other unis. But it takes a lot of effort.