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."

GO USA!!!!!!!

Woohoooooooo! Wait a minute...

Ugh not again...

I already said why the ACM programming contest is crap [slashdot.org], I won't say it again.

Re:Ugh not again...

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...

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.

And conversely...

...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...

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.

Re:Ugh not again...

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..."

In retaliation

...MIT stole Saratov State University's cannon.

Not final scores...

As someone who has their school at the competition, and I'm on the programming team (though my team didn't make it this year). Those are the scores as of one hour left in the competition.

They don't update the scores during the last hour to keep suspence for the awards ceremony. So this isn't really news at all, and the post is going to be meaningless as soon as they update the standings. I'm expecting them to be posted soon though as I think the awards ceremony ended recently.

One Question & A Short Rant

1. Anybody managed to find the actual test questions?
It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".

2. If you ever see Russian State Universities at the top of anything, be very, very cautious. I studied at MGU (Moscow State University) for a little while, and it was frankly appaling. They were taught extremely specific skillsets, they knew exactly what they would be tested in in advance of tests and didn't study *anything* else. It was like a game of 'getting through Uni without learning *anything*' which outranked anything I've ever seen back home (or heard of in the US). The methology probably lends itself well to predefined, known tests, but it produces practically useless students.

(To be fair, here back home, the ones who really learn something are the ones with a real interest in the subject, and they learn most of it outside class. There were really bright people at MGU too. It was the mindnumbingly staggering uselessness of the average student there which amazed me. It was supposed to be a "Top University".. oh, and you had to bring your own toiletpaper if you wanted to take a dump :)

Re:One Question & A Short Rant

It's always interesting to see how advanced these are. Most of the time, I'm really not impressed by the complexity of the assignments, although the optimalization work done by the teams can be pretty 'way-better-than-anything-I-could-ever-do".

You must be talking about another contest, on crack, or a super-genius (I won't hazard a guess as to which). I was on the Berkeley ACM team this year, and the International-level problems are HARD ... unless by "complexity" you mean the difficulty of writing a guess-and-check "solution" (which will be exponentially too slow). Usually, coming up with an algorithm with good asymptotic time complexity is the focus, and is very difficult. Almost all of them are not ones you can look at and just say "oh, that's max flow", etc, unlike some of the regional contest problems. And, from my experience at least, optimization is not that important at all. If you get the right algorithm, the problems can typically be solved in well under the time limit without doing anything fancy. If you do the naive thing, no amount of constant-factor optimization will allow the thing to finish before the universe ends. Just my $.02 ... don't take my word for it though, look at last year's problems and see what you think: http://cii-judge.baylor.edu/ [baylor.edu]

Re:One Question & A Short Rant

As a member of the second place team in world finals many moons ago, I have to disagree. I think the problems are actually quite simple algorithmically, and that the hard part is quickly writing working code for semicomplicated problems (including input parsing) with only one computer shared three ways.

Appaling

Yeah, dude, I know why it was "appaling". Because you couldn't handle studying there, that's why. Compared to education in the US, the situation in Russian higher education is completely the opposite of what you've described. Folks are being taught extremely broadly, perhaps with too little attention paid to practical applications of what is taught at times. And you can't narrow down the scope of your education because you _can't_ choose classes. You fucking WILL learn linear algebra, physics, differential calculus, discrete mathematics, etc., whether you like it or not.

It is expected of students to be able to figure out practical applications on their own. MGU in particular is one of the most hardcore Russian schools that is easily on par with _any_ Western college or university for which here in the US you'd be paying _through the nose_. MGU seems to be specifically designed to produce scientists and researchers, not engineers, though. MIFI, MAI, MSTU and NGU on the other hand focus on generating engineers that get shit done. The reason being, they produce most of Russia's engineers who work on weapons and high tech.

Re:One Question & A Short Rant

I studied at MGU (Moscow State University) for a little while\

As a geek that moved to Moscow recently...were you ever able to find a bookstore that sold computer books in English?

Please!?

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

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.

Heh

Start queueing up the "In Soviet Russia" one liners...

What is impressed me

Is that the winning Russian univeristies are in very provincial places. Saratov is in the middle of nowhere East of the Volga River and Altai is actually in Kazakhstan.

well,

on redundant slashdot, soviet russia jokes post YOU!

Online ACM problems

For those who want to know more about this contest in the form of actually attempting ACM questions, then I suggest heading over to their problemset archive [online-judge.uva.es] which not only has ACM stuff from the last 5 years but a large number of non-ACM programming problems in the same vein. You can sign up with them and have your solutions to their problems checked for correctness.

Since the website's a design massacre, to get to the ACM problems you need to click on the link marked THE CII ICPC LIVE ARCHIVE !!! [acmicpc-li...ive.uva.es] in the news bar, or just click on that one right there.

Waterloo!

Here is a picture of our library taken during this exam period

Library [imageshack.us]
 

I remember it well...

I remember my only entrance into the ACM programming contest. It was the first round of competition. We felt pretty good going in (calling ourselves team "Kwik Fill" after the gas station we stopped at along the way). We were the cream of the crop of the state school we attended.

The first bump in the road was the compiler on the VAX. "Couldn't it have been a Sparc, or at least a Mac?", I thought, as we spent the first hour of the competition trying to understand how to get the compiler to work. You might ask why we spent the first hour on the system and not working out algorithms to address the problems. To that, I answer: Have you seen those problems?

By now, the Dew buzz was wearing off. We almost got two programs working and took several pictures of us pretending to toss the VT220 terminal out the window before time expired.

All in all, it was a good performance. IIRC, we tied for 4th, as one team scored 4 points, two scored 3 points, one scored 2 and we were tied with the other eight teams with 1/2 point.

After that, I started focusing on networks. Ah, the good old days.

That's not a real progamming compo

This is how it's done.

http://www.ludumdare.com/ [ludumdare.com]

Creativity, cunning, coding and caffine.
 

I Remember Being in the Contest

It was a great time. The team I was on placed fourth at the competition (we would say "We're the fourth best team in the free world.") The Russians weren't participating then, though a team from Switzerland did. Along with a team from Israel if I remember right. When I was the alternate the team placed second - it's kinda depressing to know that the team did better without me :-(

Actual results

As noted previously, the mentioned scores were from an hour before the contest's end. My sources give the actual, final medal results as the following:

1. Saratov State University (Russia) - 6 problems
2. Jagiellonian University - Krakow (Poland) - 6 problems
3. Altai State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
4. University of Twente (Netherlands) - 5 problems
5. Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China) - 5 problems
6. St. Petersburg State University (Russia) - 5 problems
7. Warsaw University (Poland) - 5 problems
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) - 5 problems
9. Moscow State University (Russia) - 5 problems
10. Ufa State Technical University (Russia) - 5 problems
11. University of Alberta (Canada) - 4 problems
12. University of Waterloo (Canada) - 4 problems

Four teams each received gold, silver, and bronze (in the above order). For the same number of problems, the order is based on penalty minutes.

what were the tasks?

I haven't found info on what they had to program - I'd like to suggest to the rwth-aachen to participate next time, but I'd like to see what kinds of problems are to be solved (at least to know to which faculty I should suggest that... besides I'd be interested in that myself...)

ACSL

When I was in high school I participated in the ACSL [acsl.org] (American Computer Science League) contest among high schools which still is running. It seems similar, they had a written test on computer science related things and a series of practical team programming problems. It was a blast when our team beat the champion (we were Montclair Kimberly, I think it was the 82-83 contest). Seems like the ACM contest has more interesting and difficult problems, looks like knowledge of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing might even be useful! Looking forward to seeing the results (the programs) if they are published.

Experience with incompetent judges...

I am still angry to this day. The "judges" had the wrong answer to one of the problems. Of course, it was the problem that I took for my group. I had it right the first time, within a few minutes. Submit, wrong, time penalty. Hmmm... futz with it a little, submit, wrong, penalty, repeat. In the end, my team came in like third or fourth, due to these penalties. Turns out, the teams that came in ahead of us hadn't even submitted any answers for that problem. Of course, nobody in the competition got it right, and only one other team submitted an answer, I think. What *really* pissed me off, though, is that our fucking school administrators refused to take up the fight on our behalf to have the results changed. If we had hadn't had the penalties, I think we would have been 2nd, and if we'd been credited for the correct answer, we would have come in first. Either way, we would've gone to the next round or whatever. I don't know if this was standard everywhere or not, but they passed out the "official" answers when it was over, so we discovered how we'd been cheated on the way home, and it was trivial to verify that their answer was wrong.

However, I must agree with some of the other posters: it's not so much a programming competition. It's more of an algorithms and standard library memorization competition. I seem to recall that knowing *all* the ins and outs of the printf family of functions was pretty important. Looking at the site now, it looks like they provide docs for the standard libraries, I don't think this was the case where I went. Anyway, it's important that you know that Java has a regular expression parser as part of the std lib (and therefore usable in the contest) while C++ doesn't. In real life, if you need a regular expression parser, you go get one. Additionally, looking at last years problems, for example, one of them is a straightforward application of a shortest-path algorithm. Do I remember the inner workings of the common graph algorithms? No, I don't use them very often. But I have my reference book handy if I need it. 99% of the time, I'll just use boost::graph. That problem could be solved quite trivially in 20 minutes with boost::graph. If you want to test my knowledge of graph algorithms, that's fine. My algorithms textbook has many exercises which do just that. Just don't call it a programming test. Everything in my algo class was pen and paper. In fact, if you're a real progammer, and you didn't use boost::graph (or something similar) to solve that problem, you deserve to be fired. Writing your own from scratch is a horrible waste of time and a maintenance nightmare. In fact, the boost libraries probably trivialize a number of ACM problems, what with graph libraries, matrix libraries, parsing frameworks, regular expressions, state machines, and so forth. A programming contest would force you to use these well, not re-write them.

You forgot Poland!

I'm glad that Polish universities had a good showing. I grew up there and was educated there and always thought that CS education in Poland was top notch quality. Much better than in the UK for example, where I also studied for a while.

What a lousy way to run a programming contest

If they want a real comparison of programming talent they shouldn't make up "toy" problems for programmers -- they should come up with a series of prizes similar to, but less challenging than, The Clay Mathematics Institute Millenium Prizes [claymath.org], or, better yet just pile as much money as possible on the C-Prize [geocities.com] and let the programmers go crazy with creativity.

Other programming challenges -- with useful results are sitting around all over the place that just need some more money to get the competition kickstarted.

20 minutes too late

"When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?" - never. It's always like this: I need that code 10 minutes ago!

So 10 minutes after, we are already 20 minutes too late.

maybe this was more than a competition for some

I write code for a living professionally. I agree this competition is far from useful. However I think we Americans are overlooking some relevant facts.

We're very fortunate in the United States. It's true that we do very badly on any sort of mean international measures of educational quality. Yet, how many foreign students would give their right arm to go to Caltech or MIT? Most Americans don't have to fight for a successful life. If you want a good job, it's clearly within your grasp. Heck, you get to reach for your dreams. How many kids in a third-world country get a chance at that? If you're born into the wrong caste in India, it can be a challenge just to get an education. (Incidentally, I find the caste system [which seems to be pretty rampant to me; however feel free to correct/enlighten (or the slashdot equivalent ?flame?) me on this] pretty abhorrent.)

Sure, most tests and competitions are garbage. You could argue the Putnam and mathematical olympiads are garbage too. Is it fair that some kids compete against other kids at schools that have classes to study for the Putnam? On the other hand, some previous winners include Irving Kaplansky and Richard Feynman.

  If you want to talk about a test that doesn't accurately measure one's worth or ability.... Look at any of the GREs. Incidentally, I'm studying to take the Physics GRE. I do this because I want a chance at going to a good grad school. Sure, if I could afford to go to a better undergrad program, I would. In fact, my professors have suggested it. However, I can't and the GREs are my best shot at acceptance.

At one state university (a somewhat notable one) you can take classes to study for the Math GRE. While I'm not directly competing with those kids, I am competing with other kids who get professional preparation on the physics GRE. All I've got is a bunch of web sites and textbooks. How am I supposed to compete with this? Yet I will. I don't begrudge anyone trying their best to improve their chances for success in life.

Most of these kids in Russia (and other foreign countries) are dying for a chance to get noticed. What looks better on a CS grad school application to United States than winner ACM programming competition? Obviously good grades and research. However, I wouldn't be shocked if some these kids had that as well.

Whoever believes you can't train a genius is full of bunk. Is there any coincidence that Norbert Wiener's father was a linguistics professor at Harvard? How about Von Neumann's private tutors as a young boy? Don't you think those advantages in life make a difference? I for one congratulate everyone for their effort in the competition.

Sore Losers, really sore losers

I am not surprised but still kind of irritated that almost all of the comments here revolve around either rationalising away the fact that no american team was at the top or being directly insulting of foreign universities.

You americans are a bunch of wet nappies. You take a fucking programming and problem solving contest personally even though none of you were actually there. Not only that but you take it personally on a national level, as if your patriotic pride were somehow damaged because of this.

America is a country that has lots of strengths, such as competitiveness, but also lots of weaknesses. such as an almost total inability to lose with grace.

Maybe it's a good thing that (you americans)(sic) lost this competition.

The linked table in the TFA is incorrect.

For some reason it shows standings about 2 hours prior to the end of the competition. In fact Jagellonians from Krakow were the 2nd, Altai was the 3rd.

10 minutes!!

"When was the last time you heard someone say 'I need a piece of software in 10 minutes?" said Bill Poucher...

When was the last time you saw Chloe O'Brien on 24?

is it me?

Or did only 2 US schools rank in the top 51? (UCF Ranked 51st and I graduated from there,so I say top 51 :P )

Re:Auckland University

It's interesting to see that the best of the South Pacific universities came 80th in the World Finals.

Actually, Adelaide came 37th.

We (the University of Otago) came 27th back in 2004 when I participated. Whatever others say about the contest, I loved it and certainly enjoyed the trip to Prague.

Re:bias article

For many, it's like any sporting event -- just with lines of computer code instead of balls

Was this sporting event in prison!? Lines of balls ... vivid!

Re:Obligatory!

you do not explain these types of comments. People will mod it as funny irrespective of the meaning...