Google Code Jam Winner Announced

Wild-eyed Visionary writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Mardell, 25, of Stockholm, Sweden, beat out more than 5,000 coders to win $10,000 in Google's second annual Code Jam programming contest. Second place: Christopher Hendrie (Canada), third place: Eugene Vasilchenko (Russia), fourth place: Tomasz Czajka (Poland). Tom Rokicki, of dvips/Radical Eye Software fame, was the oldest finalist at age 40."

Anyone know...

what the problems were?

Re:Anyone know...

Not enough coders willing to work for free or cheap at Google?

Re:Anyone know...

Check out www.topcoder.com [topcoder.com]. They have a list of all the previous problems, and you can even see all the competitors' solutions if you want.

Re:Anyone know...

The easy problem was, given a topographic map (as an array of strings of the same length, with 'A' to 'Z' giving the heights), a point on the map, and a cardinal direction, return the farthest point visible in that direction from that point.

The medium problem was, given an array of integers representing the coefficients of a polynomial, return the largest root. Note that this is harder than it sounds because it's difficult to solve correctly just using Newton's method.

The hard problem was, given an integer n and a fixed, precisely defined set of keystrokes available in a hypothetical editor, return the minimum number of keystrokes required to produce exactly n copies of the same character. This required an efficient search and correct choice of state space.

A sad realization of self

It's a sad thing--if I'd won the money, I'd have just bought more computers. :(

Yes, I did RTFA...and TFWS...

But I couldn't find what the hell the contest was. What it involved, what the people had to do. Would anyone care to enlighten me?

What did they write?

So what exactly did the winners' programs do, exactly? I saw no mention in the article.

What language did they use ?

It would be interesting to know what language they used. From the rules :

Use Java, C++, C# or VB.NET. Pick any of these programming languages to code your solutions. All are acceptable and none is given an advantage.

My bet : C++

Google - Champion of the Common Man

I don't comment very often, but I always get a little tingly feeling thinking about how Google is one of the very few companies I see in the wide expanse of capitalism that seems to actually enjoy making their customers feel good about the fact that they are giving a little out of their own pocket/time. I would pay to use google, just becase google is not an angry behemoth like Microsoft, Walmart, or Big Bro.

Congrats to the guys who won, and a special congratulation to Google for being my favorite company on planet earth.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

Your two aforementioned companies are both publicly owned. They are legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders. The actual owners of the company are not involved in the daily management and have only one, single-minded reason for owning stock: profit.

When Google finally bites the bullet and has a billion dollars in other people's money, a old-school board of directors, along with the need to please the SEC and Wall Street analysts, things will change drastically. You'll suddenly see Google become much more conservative because they have so many interests to look out for and competing voices to listen to.

Then some other upstart, agile company will usurp the crown and be the geek's new flavor-of-the-week. It's just how capitalism works. The moral: Don't get to blindly attacted to Google or you're going to feel deeply betrayed--they *are* only a business after all.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

Google is smart, not "Good". If you think they are really the champions of the common man, consider the fact that they actively help the Chinese government censor most of the net for its citizens.

I use google all the time, because they know what I want, not because they are some sort of do-gooders... Because they aren't.

Re:Google - Champion of the Common Man

As your other respondent sortof points out, the primary complaints on google watch relate to people in the "search optimization industry."

These are people that want their websites to get higher rankings on Google searches. It actually has nothing whatsoever to do with poor behavior on Google's part.

Anyone notice that the winners are...

...all from outside the U.S.?

Our education system is in serious trouble.

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

Why is this a warning sign? Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, the odds were not very good that an American would be among the winners. Stop being so narrow-minded, there are bright people from all over the world--America and abroad.

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

Check out Country Ratings [topcoder.com]

US comes 13th out of the 16 ranked countries. Funnily enough, for all the outsourcing it gets, India is last.

Re:Anyone notice that the winners are...

then again, Sweden only has a population of ~9M. If you scale this to the population of the US (300M) then you get 24*300/9=800.

Admittedly that's still only half as many entrants/population as the US, but the disparity is not as huge as you suggest...

Ponxx

it figures

I gues we in the US can no longer complain that the jobs for coders are leaving the country.

my school career belongs to Jimmy Mardell

This guy is no stranger to programming. Many a day in middle school, and high school, was spent playing games Jimmy made for the TI-85 and TI-92. Specifically, he programmed Boulderdash, Tetris, Solitare, and many more to the various calculator platforms. A comprehensive list can be found at ticalc.org [ticalc.org]. Thanks man! Sqrxz was great.

if it isn't jimmy mardell!

The Google Code Jam winner was certainly famous for his skills a long time before this... even ordinary kids in my suburban high school new about Jimmy Mardell 8 years ago.

Jimmy Mardell [ticalc.org] was one of the pioneers of assembly programming for the TI calculators way back when. Without his ZTetris program (with two player link capability, no less!), high school math class would have been really boring for me.

I credit Jimmy Mardell's work for sparking my interest in game programming. It's good to see he's still on top of things.

I want that on my resume...

Imagine being able to list Google as one of your former employers. (For that matter, why would "former" need any place here?) I'd imagine that ranks reasonably high among Slashdot readers, at least in relation to Microsoft...

Yay Jimmy!

I just want to take the time to congratulate Jimmy on a job well done. I knew someone from the "TI Community" would make it big some day.

I'm sure everyone who's ever owned a recent TI graphing calculator (TI-83 and up) will remember zTetris, among other puzzle games, that Jimmy wrote.

Jimmy Mardell [ticalc.org]

Interesting that the winner was from Sweden....

It seems that the Scandinavians/NE Europeans are very talented with all parts of computing, such as programming and gaming. If i'm not mistaken, the Counter Strike clan that won the latest CPL were Swedish. I see a lot of good quality mappers that are from this part of the world, 3D-Mike [3d-mike.com] and this guy [mazy.net] for example. Oh, let's not forget Linus Torvalds. I hear that the broadband infrastructure is excellent in those parts of Europe and I suppose that will do anything but harm the situation.

Would any Eastern European /.'ers like to comment?

Now THERE'S a Polish Joke for you!

Finals results

Google CodeJam
Onsite Championship Round
Handle Score
Yarin 569.58
ChristopherH 482.17
venco 359.85
tomek 331.87

Topcoders ranking:
Top 10 Coders
Rank Handle Rating
1. tomek 3450
2. SnapDragon 3285
3. reid 3169
4. snewman 3132
5. Yarin 3058
6. NGBronson 3005
7. bladerunner 2928
8. John Dethridge 2912
9. ZorbaTHut 2881
10. WishingBone 2858

Poland Rules!

Re:Now THERE'S a Polish Joke for you!

Poland's math and computing education is modelled on the soviet degrees just like in the rest of the Eastern Europe and are much tougher than anything in the West. Course notes are essentially like reading Knuth's TAOCP. I think only MIT could give Eastern European Universities a run for its money.

They don't have many universities (for the size of the population) but they provide some of the toughest, highest quality courses in math, engineering and Computer Science.

I spent only three years in a Polish high school (they normally last four or five years) and went straight to a third year of a top British University in their Electrical Engineering programme. All of the math required was covered in the first couple of years in my high school.

Contest Languages

I wish topcoder would let people write in Common Lisp or something more fun than Java, C++, and fucking C#. Since any problem solved is just going to have to be rewritten anyway when it is implemented in the real world (or on google.com), you'd think they'd allow people more freedom than OO styles. I mean, Lisp can do OO, too!

someone was asking about job postings?

How about, "Rack yourself against 5,000 of the world's best programmers for a 1/5000 chance at $10,000 and an outside shot at a job offer. Salary is negotiable and depends on experience."

First line of the article

Turns out the Europeans can beat the best of Silicon Valley.

Well, first of all, I don't agree with that. It kind of assumes that the best of Silicon Valley were attending that contest instead of actually trying to make a go of their company!

Secondly, however, I think it might point to a weakness in our current US culture. Nearly every young person that I talk to now (I am 50, by the way), when talking about majors in college, puts any kind of technical degree at the bottom of the list. In fact, of the few that did express an interest in a technical degree, it was always with the assumption that a business degree would soon follow (direct quote from one: "Electrical Engineering with a Master's in Business Administration").

And why not? The big rewards now all go to CEO's, CFO's and a lot of other CxO's that don't really create anything, they just manage it. Aside from a few entrepreneurs who started their own technical businesses (and, no, Bill Gates does not count, I've seen the code that he "created" in the early days of his career; he's better off managing!), there are few high-profile creative technical people in the US right now. Rightly or wrongly, a helluva lot of the credit (and, lately, a lot of the blame) goes to the managers of companies, not the people who sweat blood creating products that make companies what they are today.

Unless things change radically in the next few years, I would guess we'll see a lot more of this.

Code Jam was fun

Some fun string manipulation stuff... can't recall the problem I completed in the qualification round(I managed to declare a few varialbes on the second problem I had to do then my time ran out) but it was a lot of fun and definitely educational. I never used typedefs before then... use them all the time. never used stringstreams either. Now I do...

Placed something like 160 in my group... only the top 100 advanced:(

Congrats Christopher Hendrie!!!

Christropher, a graduate of University of Waterloo, shows how much talent Canada and Waterloo has within.. I hope i get into Waterloo too :)

The problem with TopCoder

The problem with TopCoder is that it emphasizes hacky brute force solutions over elegant / high performance ones.

Which is all well and good if you need to hack something out real quick, but if you need to get something stable, robust, high performance and high quality, you're talking about a whole different set of skills.

Re:The problem with TopCoder

NASCAR requires you to drive as fast as you can without regard to safety of others and has no relevance to real world driving situations. Therefore I would never be a NASCAR driver.

Stupid argument. Draw your own conclusions

Note that when you win NASCAR, the trophy you get isn't for "Safest Commuter Driver" either. TopCoder, however, supposedly ranks developers according to their talent and ability. This is not, however, what they are doing. They're ranking them by their ability to come up with quick hacky solutions - not real software engineering.

jimmy mardell's other achievements

Besides his calculator endeavors jimmy's also a known fast typer :)

#23 all time on typerA [jouko.iki.fi].

Re:Bullshit

fucking xenophobe....

you run a company where you don't hire certain people b/c of arbitrary charecteristics and see how well you do.... I want to be your competitor so I can crush with w/ my diverse team of superior intellect and ability because I draw from a larger pool of talent instead of your artifically limited one....

Re:Good for google

5000 coders, 10,000 dollars prize... hmmmm

Actually it would be $19,750 as second, third and fourth places get cash prizes too ;)

4996 of these people wont even get any accolades for their work that the company may end up using. But thats the way it is with these type of contests.

Re:Not worth it

You're assuming that the contestants were knowingly doing it for the money and not just for the hell of it, or the challenge. Besides the top placers will probably get a job out of it, if they don't have one already.

Re:Google is snobby.. I hope this wakes them up

This is based on reality and my personal knowledge -- not what is on their website. PhD in CS for a damn INTERNSHIP! http://www.google.com/jobs/internship.html

Re:Bullshit

Last time I checked, Google was an AMERICAN company. You think that they would have the decency or the patriotism to give at least one award to an AMERICAN. Sorry Google but you are no longer my search engine of choice. Altavista here I come.

Decency? This was a competion and the best men won, what's indecent about that?

Patriotism? If google ran a crooked competition where an american got a prize they didn't earn would that make you proud? Wouldn't it be better to keep trying until you win fair and square and then take pride in that?

Re:Not worth it

This was not the same format as last year's Google Code Jam. This was a algorithmic problem solving contest where competitors given the same set of problems try to solve more problems faster than the others under a short time frame. Google could in no way benefit from the competiors' solutions because they already had solutions for testing purposes. RTFA for the exact format of the contest.

Re:Not worth it

Most people who participate in such contests don't do it for the money, but because the problem is interesting or just for the fun. I belive that most good software was written by programmers who were really into the concept, not into the money which could be made out of it. So there is nothing worthless about this, except for your comment. Remember: Nobody was forced to take part in this contest.

It seem to me that you are lacking any insight into hackerdom and geek culture and how good programmers and hackers think and work. If you are really and associate professor in computer science, your comment makes me sick. But i don't believe that a person who was moderated so often as troll like you that he got a starting score of zero is really a professor.

www.topcoder.com - you are being exploited!

I just got done taking a look at www.topcoder.com. I must say, outside of a few real competition related challenges, this site appears to me to be a complete exploitation scam to get practically free consulting.

The people who are competing for prizes are, AFAICT, donating their labor to solve real problems for real companies. Take a look at the set of current "competitions" here [topcoder.com]

Or, how about this quote (trying to lure "customers", ahem... Donations for competitions):

What Our Customers Are Saying
"What makes Topcoder unique among component library vendors is their development strategy. It harnesses the strength of the global development community that has been so effective in creating the GNU tools, Linux kernel, Apache and the rest of the components that have formed the backbone of the modern day Internet, ensuring quality through rigorous peer review and testing while at the same time providing the contributors some additional incentive to participate in the process."

or, this one:

Over 30,000 developers are competing to build your next application. Learn how TopCoder delivers high-quality software at a lower cost than the competition.

So, do you want to work for free, for a chance to win less than you would have made in your job to do the same thing? All for the opportunity to get listed as a good coder on a site that exploits you?

If so, be embarrassed... Be very embarrassed.

Re:Bullshit

Google - Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages:

Google Search: Altavista
First site returned: [altavista.com]
Hmm..... returns the 'competitor' - commies?
Or worse - liberals!
;~0

Altavista searching worldwide: Google
First site returned: [hoovers.com]

Serves business first - you're right - very American.

Totally worth it

One-hundred hours of my time is worth about $7,000 (100 hours * 70 dollars per hour salary).

Just to clue you in to a little known fact:

The vast majority of people in developed countries make nowhere near $70 an hour.

I'd venture that a lot of the people going in for something like that probably make more in the $10-20 range.

$10,000 is a hell of a lot of money for someone just starting out, or not making $140,000 a year like yourself.

Re:Bullshit

It's that kind of closed minded bigotry that makes people the world only get pissed off at americans. The sun does not shine out of your ass because you were born in the USA.

Sorry to the americans that *aren't* like that - as with most things, the few spoil it for everyone.

Re:Bullshit

The American thing to do is pick the best man (or woman) for the job, regardless of their national origin. That is what makes this country great.

Re:Bullshit

That's not patriotism your talking about, that's nationalism.

Re:Good for google

Wrong. It's not a creative contest -- all competitors are given the same contest problems (check out TopCoder's site [topcoder.com]) which are reasonably small (most of the seasoned experts can sling through the set of 3 problems in an hour/hour and a half or so) and usually need to be solved with efficient algorithms (knowledge of graph theory, efficient search techniques, dynamic programming, etc. helps.) They have nothing to do with Google's product or technology.

Nice troll though.

-fren

Re:Google is snobby.. I hope this wakes them up

Meritocracy is the way to determine who knows their stuff and academic merit does not hold up well to real world merit in my experience. Of the best coders I have ever met many are college dropouts ... .

Sigh. This debate seems to rage on without ever coming to a adequate conclusion. Does having a degree in Comp. Sci. mean you're a good coder? Obviously not. But it does actually indicate some very important things that may determine's one success in the business world.

First of all, a Comp Sci degree consists of more than simply programming courses. In fact, instruction in particular programming languages is minimal in any decent Comp Sci program of which I know. What you learn instead are concepts, which if you learn them adequately, you should be able to apply to any number of situations. Besides computer related courses, you are also required to take courses that may be in unrelated subjects like (gasp!) English, History, Philosophy, or the Arts and Social Sciences in general. Being able to succeed in a broad range of courses and being able to learn abstract concepts indicates to an employer that you can do more than just code. Frankly, I would rather take a job that requires a degree than one that doesn't, because chances are that the job that requires a degree will allow some career mobility and won't restrict you to solely being a coder for the time during which you are at the company. The job that requires only that you know umpteen million languages or software products basically means you will be confined to a very narrow role while you're employed in that job, and when those particular tasks are no longer relevant to the company, you will be expendable.

I have worked with "college dropouts" in the past, and my experience has not been the most positive. Some of them, I agree, were very good coders, but this seemed to be the extent of their abilities. There were certain aspects of the product on which I worked that had a more mathematical bent, and when these aspects of the product were discussed among the degreed developers, those without the degrees seemed to have no clue what we were talking about.

Having said all that, I have also worked with degreed developers who are incompetent. But, in general, my expereince has been that those with a degree are better overall developers than those without. I think people in the business world realize this as well, and that is why a lot of jobs in the software industry require a degree.

Re:Not worth it

Dartmouth just fell off my list of colleges to apply to. Thanks for helping me not waste my time applying and possibly making the mistake of actually going there.

Re:Google is snobby.. I hope this wakes them up

Judging by your English, I'm going to guess that you are not one of those academic aristocrats?

Re:Not worth it

One-hundred hours of my time is worth about $7,000 (100 hours * 70 dollars per hour salary).


Using your reasoning, your post to slashdot just cost you $6.

Re:Not worth it

applicants spent at least a hundred hours of their own time

What? I spent, all told, about 3-4 hrs. I got eliminated in the second round, so I did the qualification round (2 problems, 1 hour), the first round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs), and the second round (3 problems, 1.5 hrs). Factor in a little chatting time before and after rounds.

The thing was meant to be a competition, which means you know you're going in with only slight chance of winning anything. I went in for the fun of competing with peers. Note that the problem solutions aren't being harvested and used in Google, the problems aren't like that. It was just a competition.

By the way, it was totally worth it. I won a t-shirt. ;)

Re:google sponsorship of coding competition

Remove "over." If Google is God [cnn.com], then you welcome our new search engine Lord.

Re:Google is snobby.. I hope this wakes them up

Ph.D. at Stanford is par for the course
Ph.D. which founder Larry Page never got...

Re:Bullshit

Better check again, Sparky. The U.S. isn't Sweden, yet, but programs like Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, etc. are all socialist in nature in that they compel people who create wealth to support those who don't. We as a country should care for and help people who need it, but in a non-Socialist country such activity would be done voluntarily by individuals and corporations, not by force of law. The U.S. is a socialist country, and you have Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt to thank for it.