Russian Team Wins, US Places 11th at ‘Battle of the Brains’

[Purveyor]

Source: RIA Novosti

WASHINGTON, July 5 (RIA Novosti) – A crack squad of Russian computer programmers took advantage of the home terrain to win 1st prize at the world finals of The Association of Computing Machinery’s International Computer Programming Contest (ICPC) in St. Petersburg this week, while the highest placed American team narrowly missed out on the top ten.

The St. Petersburg National Research University of IT, Mechanics and Optics won the prestigious contest for the second year in a row. The top scoring US team was Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, placing 11th.

The Association of Computing Machinery’s ICPC, also known as “The Battle of the Brains,” began as a contest held at Texas A&M University in 1970, but in 1997 IBM became sponsor and participation has since expanded by more than 1100 percent.

According to the official website, “This year, ICPC participation included 29,479 of the finest students and faculty in computing disciplines from 2,322 universities from 91 countries on six continents.”

Read more: http://en.rian.ru/world/20130705/182081101/Russian-Team-Wins-US-Places-11th-at-Battle-of-the-Brains.html

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OUCH!!!

[dkf]

1. But were they really students?

[Nanjing to Seoul]

2. American exceptionalism at its finest. USA!!! USA!!! Look at all that money we spend

on our military and our prisons. But pennies for our education.

AND HERE IS THE RESULT!!!!

[nineteen50]

3. Might be all the poison we put on and in our food air and water.

[William769]

4. Don't expect it to last.

They are trying to dumb down their citizens. But then when your a nation of bigots what do you expect.

[demosincebirth]

5. So we're not #1.

[dipsydoodle]

11. Unless you're talking about incarceration

United States incarceration rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

[joshcryer]

6. Video of the competitors:

The challenges are similar to what are on this site: http://uva.onlinejudge.org/

Congrats to the Russian team!

[colorado_ufo]

10. Fun video!

Lots of great young minds at work there!

[alcibiades_mystery]

7. 11th is not "placing"

It's losing.

Just sayin'.

[joshcryer]

13. There were almost 50 competitors in the finals.

11 out of 46 isn't bad at all, especially considering that the US hasn't won since 1991. One could tout then that the US is tied with Russia in wins, but most of that was in the early years, when it was a primarily US event, which isn't exactly a fair metric, either.

[bluedigger]

8. Congratulations to our winning team!

[AdHocSolver]

9. However, our team had the highest student debt of any contestants. nt

[Deuce]

12. Congratulations to the Carnegie Mellon University team...

[jakeXT]

14. Russia, Asia and Poland are strong

http://icpc.baylor.edu/download/worldfinals/problems/icpc2012.pdf

I noticed there are 12 problems from last years challenge.
Are the teams so big that each individual can solve one problem?

It probably is enough to write the code in one big chunk without structure. As long as it works with the test case, or are there other criteria?

[joshcryer]

15. Generally, yes, but the big points are in the main program challenge.

It's possible to write the main program challenge in one big chunk, but it's clear from the results that the Russian university students decided to work together on it. You can watch the replay of the program on the site. They actually accounted for every single scenario. There's no way one person came up with the result. No way in heck.

Interestingly, one program that made it the furthest kept to the "bottom level" gaining points, running back and forth, but the Russian program was everywhere, gaining points where ever possible. They really thought through the problem completely and didn't assume that there was an easy answer. This is actually a testament to the ACMs challenge program as much as the programmers itself.

It's really difficult to make a problem that isn't cheatable, or gamed by smart thinkers thinking about ways to get around the rules (in fact the rules changed a bit during the challenge, because some felt there were inconsistencies and some felt that the challenge program wasn't living up to its potential).

This was an excellent contest overall. I'm glad Carnegie Melon made it as far as they did. It wasn't an easy problem.

[secondvariety]

16. We're

number one one!