Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Competitive Programming Curriculum

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#21

Post by zhirzh »

pgt wrote: post #17

Competitive coding competitions are useful because they force you to exercise some valuable real-world skills: shipping technical solutions on a schedule while prioritising problems of unknown size in order of your own team's abilities. Under the clock, you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and usually learn something about algorithms. This sounds a lot like startups.

> shipping technical solutions on a schedule I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#22

Post by escherize »

zhirzh wrote: post #21
pgt wrote: post #17

Competitive coding competitions are useful because they force you to exercise some valuable real-world skills: shipping technical solutions on a schedule while prioritising problems of unknown size in order of your own team's abilities. Under the clock, you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and usually learn something about algorithms. This sounds a lot like startups.

> shipping technical solutions on a schedule I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

> The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

That sounds like a startup to me.

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#23

Post by pflats »

misja111 wrote: post #11

"An acm day is a day at which you do nothing but pracitce, typically spending 16 hours in practice and sleeping/eating/doing other stuff in 8 hours. For sure, this is not reasonable for our daily lives, but we need to define such a day as it is suitable for feeling progressive." I don't get it. If it is agreed upon that this acm day is not reasonable or practical, why do we still need to define it and why is it 'suit…

I was curious too, so I took a closer look.

The beginner/"pupil" curriculum is 28 "days", or 448 study-hours.

Conveniently for comparison, a college course is generally 15-16 weeks long. A 4-credit course would be 4×16 hours classroom hours, so a 4-credit course with 3 study hours per classroom hour would be 12×16 hours.

So the beginner curriculum is equivalent to two and a half of the hardest 4-credit courses in your degree program.

The intermediate/"specialist" curriculum is 37 "days".

I would imagine the "acm day" is both to not scare away the potential student and to actually make designing curricula of that magnitude feasible. (I used to write K-12 curricula professionally, and it's no small task.)

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#24

Post by [deleted] »

escherize wrote: post #22
zhirzh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shipping technical solutions on a schedule I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

> The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance. That sounds like a startup to me.

[deleted]

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#26

Post by likelynew »

overlordalex wrote: post #18
likelynew wrote: post #12

Can anyone here explain why is competitive coding used so much in the hiring process. I think while basic things like asymptotic complexity or binary search are sometimes used in real world, I am still to see a problem which uses advanced competitive coding knowledge. Why base so much on a test that is almost surely never used. I am generally good at competitive coding, and I think I will be on the gaining side once…

Mainly because us interviewers tend towards the sadism end of the spectrum /s Personally I use it to determine how a candidate approaches a problem. Most of these types of questions have an obvious solution that has a terrible runtime, and then have several optimisation layers on top of that. I want to see: * can the candidate reason about a complex problem that has multiple steps. * are they able to offer a basic so…

> There are no 'right' answers to these questions - it's about the process.

Isn't this the whole point of this. The answer is obviously correct or not. Yes, there may be more than one correct, but saying "there are no 'right' answers" seems plain wrong in this situation to me.

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#27

Post by rak00n »

escherize wrote: post #22
zhirzh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shipping technical solutions on a schedule I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.

> The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance. That sounds like a startup to me.

You face the same problems though. Bad codes are hard to debug and a simple mistake can cause you big time penalty. Some solutions get too complex to implement in time if you write bad codes.

So no, it doesn't promote writing bad codes.

Re: Competitive Programming Curriculum

#28

Post by rf15 »

jasode wrote: post #13
rf15 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I enjoy the questions, but not the competitive mindset surrounding it. It's like casual cycling vs racing.

>It's like casual cycling vs racing. If you're offering up that analogy yourself, I guess I don't understand why you're asking, "what's the point of competitive programming?" The point of " competitive _anything_" is The Competition itself. What's the point of competition running?!? Shouldn't running be a utilitarian function of escaping an angry lion in the African savanna? Therefore, what's the point of Usain Bolt…

Good conclusion. Yeah, I don't think I understand competition as a whole, and this is just another facet of this.
Post reply on HN