2006 ACM Programming Contest Complete

prostoalex writes "World finals for 2006 ACM programming contest took place in San Antonio, TX this year, and the results are in. Russia's Saratov State University solved 5 contest problems in record time, followed closely by Altai State Technical University (Russia) with 5 problems solved as well. University of Twente (Netherlands), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China), Warsaw University (Poland), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Moscow State University (Russia), University of Waterloo (Canada) and Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) all completed 4 problems."

I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?!?!?

[shadowen1977]

I like this quote from the story.... "When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?" Ask my boss.... He needs it in 5.

Re:GO USA!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, wow, you found one thing that the US doesn't completely dominate in. Meanwhile we have the largest and richest economy, the mightiest military force in the history of the world, and the cultural and social influence of everybody around the world.

I wonder if these kids who won will now be looking to attend the best higher educational system in the world, or looking for a well-paying job in the best job market in the world. Wait a minute, that's the good old U S of A.

Re:Ugh not again...

[Tammuz]

It's generally unfair to judge ACM teams by the polish of their answers, since the only criteria is to solve the problem in minimum time. Similarly, problems are chosen with the time-constraint in mind, not out of any attempt to further science. If you want that, try the MCM [comap.com].

What's impressive about the winning solutions is that they went from having nothing to implementing a working program from scratch, under stress in only a few minutes. While that is arguably not applicable to being a programmer in real-life, just as being an Olympic sprinter doesn't prepare you for any particular job, it is certainly a commendable intellectual achievement.

Re:Ugh not again...

[Expert Determination]

It's no *programming* contest at all. It's much more like an algorithm-solving+text formatting race. They don't test your REAL programming skills - your ability to create your own programming libraries, the organization of your source code, the maintainability, etc.

Oh please! That's like saying the Olympics aren't a real contest because they only test the prowess of athletes, not their ability to tidy up the locker room after use, their politeness towards other clients at the gym or how nice their outfits look on TV.

Re:Ugh not again...

[schnitzi]

Your rant sounds like an angry ex post facto rationalization for losing.

I've spent many years involved in ACM programming contests, as a competitor, coach, and judge. And let me tell you, every team that considers it a hacking contest, and treats it like a hacking contest, LOSES. The teams that write well organized code, with simple straightforward solutions, win the day every time.

I'm not surprised you did poorly.

BTW, of course they compare output files. Would you really expect the judges to give an aesthetic judgment of each program in a five hour contest? "9.8 from the Russian judge..."

Re:Ugh not again...

[GlassHeart]

That's like saying the Olympics aren't a real contest because they only test the prowess of athletes, not their ability to tidy up the locker room after use, their politeness towards other clients at the gym or how nice their outfits look on TV.

No, that's like saying the Olympics isn't a real contest of athletics because you're only testing how fast they can run 100 meters. The results don't show who was fastest at 10 meters, 50 meters, or who would be fastest at 150 or 1,000 meters. Recognizing this shortcoming, the Decathlon adds up the scores from multiple events to find the best all-around track and field athlete.

A programming contest is the equivalent of a single track and field event. There's nothing wrong with that, but we have to be careful what conclusions we draw from its results.

And conversely...

[Expert Determination]

...I've spent too much time in companies where people write nice, neat, tidy, well documented and easy to maintain code, but nobody actually knows how to do anything other than plumb one API into another. Every so often I'd come across a tool that someone had written that actually did something and I'd be bemused. How the hell did this lot write that? And I'd dig down through the source code and eventually find that under the mountain of wrappers and delegators and empty architecture there was actually a nugget, like V'ger [wikipedia.org], that did real work. And someone would explain to me "that's the code that Joe wrote years ago, he left and now we daren't touch that stuff, we just maintain the wrappers".

The truth is that you need both kind of people in software companies. And the other truth is that the people who write the nuggets do interesting work that is worthy of displaying publicly in a contest. And the rest do work that isn't.

Having said that, plumbing competitions [pmmag.com] aren't completely unheard of.

Re:Ugh not again...

[dubbreak]

Not sure that is the right analogy.. it'd be more like if the olympics had one event: the 100 meter dash. That is exactly what this competition is, a single event race, it's only measure is speed of completion. Of course it is hard to evaluate less tangibles like maintainabilty and ease of reuse.

My proposal: make programming competitions more like figure skating, where you get points on different aspects from a variety of judges. Might make a interesting tv show even (probably not in all honesty).

Re:Ugh not again...

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're missing is how hard the problems are, hard as in "math" not as in "complicated, annoying specs". Time is only used as a tiebreaker, how many problems you solve is what matters most. In fact most teams spend much longer wasting terminal time on flawed algorithms than they do typing up problems they have solved - in other words, if you know how to do a problem, there is plenty of time to implement it. (Teams that know how to solve lots of problems might run into time issues, but this rarely affects more than 1 problem, so these teams are going to be at the top anyway). If it's all about speed, how can you explain the 30+ teams that only got 1 problem, despite being composed three of the top individuals from one of the best schools in some geographical region as determined by a preliminary round of this same type of contest, when most winning teams got the same problem in 1 attempt approximately 25 minutes after the contest started? What you're arguing is like saying that "the International Mathematics Olympiad only tests peoples' equation-writing speed" - maybe a few of the top few contestants will have to fill an entire notebook in 6 hours, but it's actually figuring out how to do the problems that is the real challenge.