
2016 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Scoreboard - s_dev
https://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/
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pykello
A new edX course [1] was announced few days ago, which is created by SPb ITMO
(which finished 7th this year).

[1] [https://www.edx.org/course/how-win-coding-competitions-
secre...](https://www.edx.org/course/how-win-coding-competitions-secrets-
itmox-i2cpx)

~~~
Cyph0n
The course looks really interesting to be frank. I've recommended it to my
college's competitive programming team actually!

ITMO did not get 1st place this year because the team changed, and I believe
_tourist_ graduated. Last year [1] for example they solved all 13 problems,
while the 2nd team solved 11; there simply was no competition.

7th is still an excellent result. Let's see what they do next year!

[1]: [http://a2oj.com/ICPC.jsp?y=2015](http://a2oj.com/ICPC.jsp?y=2015)

~~~
yourratzon
Tourist in ineligible because he has already participated twice, which is the
limit.

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s_dev
Why are Russians so historically good at these competitions?

China have raw numbers, America has the resources/ecosystems to train and
prepare these programmers. Russia seems to have neither and regularly
outperform both nations.

~~~
virtuabhi
I believe that it is because of two reasons [massive generalization
follows...] (1) emphasis on math and physics (2) stress on discipline and rote
learning. US students have (1), Chinese have (2), Russians have both. You
would realize that most competitors in these contests end up doing pattern
matching with previously solved problems. In addition, they keep a catalogue
of most asked questions, common codebase, etc. for reference and pulling out
code. I do not think that these competitions produce good programmers as they
incentivize writing quick, ugly, non-resusable code.

~~~
arghbleargh
While you are correct in pointing out that these contests only test a
relatively narrow subset of the skills needed for good programming, I don't
think it would be correct to say it's based on "rote learning". There can be
some amount of pattern-matching, but it's not as if you can just read the
solutions to 100 problems and expect to do well.

Also, I know for a fact that many (but not all) people who were good at these
contests are also good all-around programmers. (In fact, you probably do
better at these contests by writing more readable code, even accounting for
the time cost. But some people can get by with messy code as well.)

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codepie
Problems :
[https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2016.pdf](https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2016.pdf)
. Problems can be tried online at
[https://icpc.kattis.com/problems](https://icpc.kattis.com/problems)

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Technophilis
Scoreboard with links to the TopCoder handles of the team members
[http://zibada.ru/finals/](http://zibada.ru/finals/)

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sagatsnee
In the US, the smarter students don't generally waste their time with these
programming competitions. Grades, research, and extra credit would matter more
towards a student's academic success. These contests generally appeal more to
"hobbyists" or those who have nothing better to do with their time, and so you
get biased results.

~~~
ekm2
Explain then why Harvard is #3 on the list (and MIT at #6).

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kolbe
Can someone explain the significance of this competition? I've never heard of
it before and am just looking for a little understanding of what, if anything,
there is to read into the results.

~~~
pkd
Competitive Programming is a sport where teams(or individuals in some
instances) compete with each other to solve a set of algorithmic questions in
the shortest time. This generally happens on a system called the Online Judge
which is basically a system for code evaluation.

ACM ICPC is basically the Olympics of Competitive Programming.

The significance can vary from person to person but sometimes Universities and
Companies look favourably at good results in such competitions.

~~~
kolbe
So, like the olympics, the important member organizations put a reasonable
enough amount of effort into it to ensure they're represented well? Like, I
really should be looking at UCF as a college that produces some of the best
programmers in the US?

~~~
pkd
The members that perform well are those who have the organisations which care.
It doesn't necessarily translate to a great CS program at the university.
Sometimes teams are also carried by one or two brilliant competitive
programmers that crop up from somewhere and then disappear in four years time.

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interconnector
Stanford course on Programming Contests:
[http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs97si/](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs97si/)

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HaseebR7
Hmm, Kim Il Sung University is ranked 30th. Didn't know NK sent students to
ACM ICPC.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Il-
sung_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Il-sung_University)

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divkakwani
I have always found a lack of books on advanced things that I've encountered
in competitive programming like Fenwick trees, link-cut trees, rmq etc. Can
anybody recommend book(s) that contain these things?

~~~
arknave
I don't know how many books there are on those topics. A lot of the data
structures in higher level competitive programming problems have pretty niche
uses. It might be best to look at papers instead. Here's one on the
Fenwick/Binary Indexed Tree:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=503...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=5033B72D44A20319647FE3815574B194?doi=10.1.1.14.8917&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

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az0xff
Would like to give my congratulations to my school, the 99th place University
of British Columbia. The team is composed entirely of first-time World Finals
participants!

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pbnjay
I did a competitive programming course in undergrad, these problems are really
interesting if you're not familiar with it. I highly recommend folks try a few
problems and look at the solutions. It can be really eye-opening.

However, I really haven't applied much of what I learned doing the problems to
"real" work. It's cool to see methods of looking at things differently, but
just doesn't translate well to software development.

~~~
teraflop
Speaking as a former ICPC competitor/coach, I think the aspect that most
directly translated to professional software development was getting practice
at quickly writing _and reviewing_ code for performance and correctness.

A bit of background about ICPC, for those who don't know: It's a team
competition. You have 3 contestants on a team, but only one computer on which
to write, test and submit your code. Most of the work of solving a problem is
usually done in your brain or on paper, so typically, one person will be
coding at a time while the other two think about problems and get ready to
rotate to the keyboard.

But although the primary scoring criterion is number of problems solved, you
also get penalized for time taken and incorrect attempts. So it's really
important to be able to glance over someone else's shoulder and notice things
like "oh, there's an off-by-one error in that loop condition" or "you forgot
about such-and-such an edge case".

~~~
pbnjay
That's fair. It's definitely good for training/exercising the syntax parser
and debugger in your head without relying on an IDE or compiler errors. And
you definitely have to plan ahead to complete the problems in the time
allotted. Debugging in my head has always been one of my strong suits so I
tend to forget that other people have other strengths first. :)

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jonathankoren
I look at these rankings, and can't help but notice that it's basically
whatever school has a club that really cares. Looking at the American schools,
no one is going to rank the computer science program at the Illinois Institute
of Technology above the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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maruhan2
Surprised that Kaist is so far up there. While they are the best in science in
Korea and they do have a dedicated team that practices, they still have very
few students in undergrad.

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wehadfun
I organized these for freshmen at my school. Reading through these comments we
had small chance of getting to these levels since other places offered
competitive programming courses.

~~~
kilotaras
Lviv University that finished 11th offers no such course.

There's actually a study group where the winner team and number of older
contestants rotate to talk.

P.S. Link [Ukrainian] for anyone interested
[http://mycollege.org.ua/](http://mycollege.org.ua/)

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Zitrax
Problem H was apparently not popular at all. Something special about it ?

~~~
kevinwang
I'd say so. It looks pretty. .. unappetizing:
[https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2016.pdf](https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2016.pdf)

