2007 ACM Contest Winners Announced

prostoalex writes "2007 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is over with Warsaw University (Poland) winning it this year and solving all of the problems. The runner-up, Tsinghua University (China), finished with 7 problems solved, while St. Petersburg University of IT, Mechanics and Optics (Russia) and MIT (USA) are tied up for the third place with 6 problems solved. There were 6000 teams initially in the running, and in the final round of the competition only 88 remained."

No Indian universities achieved a top ranking?

I'm surprised that no Indian universities achieved a higher ranking. They place much emphasis on competing in these sorts of programming challenges.

On one hand, it is essential to be able to quickly come up with creative solutions for a wide variety of problems. But it is also essential to focus on the other aspects of software development, including maintainability and quality. From my experience, those who come out of Indian universities have the problem solving skills, but they lack the full spectrum of skills necessary to produce software. The high degree of emphasis only on problem solving, contest-style skills may be the reason for this.

Two Dum to help myself

In Soviet Russia, Third Place Wins You!

Why MIT lost

They forgot about Poland!

Problem inputs?

The PDF of the problem sets are up, but no mention of when/where the input data and solutions will be posted. Are these currently available?
 

Go Tsinghua!

I've never been to Warsaw, but I did spend some time at Tsinghua University last year. The people that attend Tsinghua are quite literally the best and brightest that China can produce, and that's saying something. The entrance requirements are brutally difficult, and the students I dealt with were some of the smartest people I've ever met. I'm not surprised that Tsinghua students can go toe-to-toe with the best American students and win.

    These contest results become even more impressive when you consider that Tsinghua, like many developing Universities, currently has one hand tied behind its back. Tsinghua's School of Software is only a few years old, and has very limited resources. The library is small, the facilities are lacking, and the dorms are absolutely atrocious to live in (much less study). Much of the learning material that these kids are using is in English, not their native language. The fact that they're internationally competitive in any way is astounding.

    A lot of us in the American educational system have a kind of bigotry when looking at foreign universities. This is particularly true in the Computer Science field. We see these kind of results and say "Well, these foreign students may be good at these programming challenges, but what can they do in the real world?" There may be a grain of truth there, but not for long. What happens in twenty years, when the great Universities of China, India, Poland, etc. have had some time to develop their C.S. and engineering programs? As an American, I want to believe that my country produces the best engineers and programmers in the world, but I think we're going to have some very stiff competition in the future.

Re:Go Tsinghua!

The thing is that Poland has had time to develop their CS programs which is why they're so good, the soviets did not exactly skimp out on such things (you have lines for bread but free good education). They may actually be going downhill more than anything now, for various reasons. I've heard complaints from former students (ie: students back during the soviet years) of the CS program degrading now.

That's for example why you have so many hackers in the former soviet bloc, there is an infrastructure to educate people but for a good time (after the USSR collapsed) there were no jobs for them.

Poland is an industrialized/technological nation but simply has a horrid government and crappy economy (later is partially a result of the former).

Still as I understand it Warsaw University is one of the places to go to school in Poland and its free if you get in. Granted the entrance requirements/system is arsine (for many reasons) but that applies to all Polish public universities. I guess I'd call it SATs on crack and while they do catch a lot of the good students they also don't catch a lot of them.

9th Question

I heard the ninth question was Fizzbuzz, but it was deemed too difficult for the competition.

There were 10 problems, not 8

The summary is incorrect. They solved 8, which was more than any other team, but left two problems unattempted. If you look at the packet you can easily see why.

UT vs UT

Wow! UT Dallas placed and UT Austin (honorable mention) did not. That is shocker. At least we got the football team. Hook 'em horns!

Polish team

Filip Wolski in the winning team, won the gold medal at the World Computer Science Contest in Mexico last year.

Seems like a pretty smart guy :)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1687592/p osts/ [freerepublic.com]

But the judging data was screwed up (again)

Many teams lost untold time on J because the judge data did not meet the input specification.

ICPC has had this problem before. Four times in my direct experience, most notably ICPC World Finals 2000 [slashdot.org] at which they refused to acknowledge their error until weeks later.

This year the data for problem J was wrong, so teams got "run time error" instead of "wrong answer;" many spent vast amounts of time trying to find the source of their crash when in fact it was the judges' fault. All submissions were rejudged at the eleventh hour, when it was too late to fix the problem or to move on to another question.

There is really no excuse for this sort of error. Published guidelines [win.tue.nl] make it clear that input checkers should be written for all problems, yet the finals judges don't bother, and the finals organization imposes no standard on them to do so. Furthermore, the organizers refuse to release any information about the test sets, so we have no idea how many screwups have been covered up.

Here is a list of data errors for which I have first-hand knowledge. I'm sure there are many more.

Finals '97 -- Problem C has ambigous output but the
                            judges rejected some correct solutions
                            (all but their expected one?) Complaints
                            were responded to with "no response."

Finals '98 -- Problem D had empty lines in the input,
                            contrary to the specification.

Finals '00 -- The infamous graph that was not connected,
                            contrary to the problem spec (Problem F)

Finals '07 -- Problem J was supposed to have maximum size
                            64, but was 100. Rejudged in the last hour
                            of contest. Many submissions changed from
                            run-time or time limit to wrong answer.

I am at a loss to understand why the organizers fail to implement better quality control, and why they refuse to release the data and solutions. Bad calls will happen, but the lack of quality control and the lack of transparency exacerbates the problem considerably. These failures, in my opinion, detracts substantially from the contest.

Gordon Cormack
Coach, Waterloo ACM Team

It was fun

I participated back when I was in school. It was a lot of fun. We did well (4th one year, 2nd the next), so that helped!

My old school was tied for last this year, but hey at least they were there.

test cases available?

I know of official test cases aren't made public, so that the officials can cover up their mistakes. But does anyone else provide test cases they made up after the contest? In my experience, dealing with corner cases you didn't think of is one of the hardest things to get right.

meh...

Success of Chinese teams is hardly surprising- Chinese high school students have been dominating the IOI (Informatics Olympiad, very similar to ICPC) for ages.

Its only a matter of time and resources before they equal or surpass top US unis

Don't see Polish or Chinese software being pirated

I don't see Polish or Chinese software being pirated. It's always those lousy Americans'.

Re:No surprise.

I thought a nice surprise was that there were 4 canadian universities placing highly, and a fifth that got an honorable mention.

Re:Good job Harvard

Two points:

1) Harvard is not one of the top computer science universities in the United States. It is a good university nonetheless. And money can't buy better credentials :)

2) I think that alot of schools make half-assed attempts at the ACM contest. Meaning, maybe they get a handful of kids together to work on some practice problems a couple of times, maybe even once a week over a semester. When I went to CMU that's how it was, more or less. My friend was on the ACM team that went to nationals but didn't make it to internationals. I know what his course load was like that semester. I know that the ACM contest must have been pretty low on the priority queue.

There are some universities that I expect want the notariety of winning the ACM badly enough that the students who participate do little else besides prepare for the ACM. I would not expect Harvard to be one of those schools. What do they have to prove? They're Harvard for chrissakes!

Re:Do anyone counterfit Made in China goods?

In fact, almost everything is counterfeit from Chinese goods, since the original "high western quality" goods are also made in Chinese factories.