
Programmers of ITMO University win the ACM ICPC for the sixth time - bpatelcs
http://en.ifmo.ru/en/viewnews/4822/Programmers_of_ITMO_University_are_the_winners_of_the_2015_ACM_for_the_sixth_time.htm
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plesiv
ITMO managed to solve all the problems and win with 2 more solved problems
than the second team [1] - which is extremely rare.

Gennady Korotkevich extends his impressive list of achievements in competitive
programming (contested by no one else in the history) [2]. He's currently on
top of both most prestigious rankings: Codeforces [3] and Topcoder [4] (with
insane lead in the former).

There's a list of ICPC World Finals participants with their online handles [5]
(ranked before the contest according to their likelihood of winning). There
are video explanations of all solutions from the World Finals [6].

[1] [http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/](http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich#Career_achi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich#Career_achievements)

[3] [http://codeforces.com/ratings](http://codeforces.com/ratings)

[4]
[https://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank](https://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank)

[5]
[http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/15090](http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/15090)

[6]
[http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/18016](http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/18016)

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dym
Problem set:
[http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2015.pdf](http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/problems/icpc2015.pdf)

Complete results:
[http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results](http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results)

UC Berkeley placed highest in North America, beating MIT, CMU, Harvard and
Stanford.

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vbezhenar
This contest is very prestigious in Russia and participants are spending a lot
of time to prepare. Is it the same in other countries?

~~~
custo15
As a russian software developer from Moscow I can say that this contest is not
well-known in Russia software community and it is completely not obvious that
this contest is prestigious in some way. It may give you some points on the
interview, but is not key point at all.

Actually, most of russian software developers even do not know about this
contest.

Wrapping up, it is very, very weak statement that this contest is "very
prestigious in Russia" and many people "are spending a lot of time to
prepare". I think that ITMO have a good base for this contest is a more
reasonable point.

Sorry my broken English.

~~~
x4m
I'm dev from Yekaterinburg and I'd disagree. Devs here like to watch ICPC. But
it is student championship. Most of my colleagues just are not students.
Mature programmers prefer ICFPC (:

~~~
custo15
I'm agree that there's a passion among developers for such contests in Moscow,
too. But my point is that this is not something "prestigious" and as a
consequence a reason why many people "spending a lot of time" for it.

I mean you will not get any major benefits for investing in this, or
something. It's interesting but not must-have for a professional developer.
And that's why I not see a lot of people around coding contest-like tasks
instead of, for example, contibuting to open source or doing freelance job,
etc.

~~~
x4m
That`s true, according to Peter Norvig "Being good at programming competitions
correlates negatively with being good on the job"
[http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-
work-p...](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/programming-competitions-work-
performance/)

~~~
minwcnt5
You forgot to add the key qualifier "at Google". That says nothing about how
being good at programming competitions correlates with being good on the job
in general.

It's also kind of common sense that if you spend a lot of time working on
something that's not really related to your industry job that won't be as good
at said industry job as if you spent that time, say, writing open source
machine learning software. People just assume that programming == software
engineering, but programming competitions are a lot more similar to math
competitions than they are to real world jobs.

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kenjackson
Curious, why does the US do relatively poorly at ICPC, but relatively well at
IMO. I know they are different competitions, but I would have thought there
would be more correlation. Especially since most people believe that US
universities are stronger than US high schools.

In IMO we are consistently top 3 (China dominating). In ICPC we are more like
5-10, with Russia dominating.

Unless the big thing that captures the difference is that in IMO the US is one
team, whereas in ICPC you split up the US competitors to probably 10-20
competitive colleges, whereas maybe in Russia the top students tend to
aggregate at one school more than in the US?

~~~
blue11
I believe that it's mostly a question of incentives.

IMO/IOI are very prestigious competitions for high school students. Doing well
there can help you get into the college of your choice. This is true for US
students as well as for students in other countries.

ICPC is a college students competition, but if you are a student in a good US
college there isn't a lot to gain from it. You have plenty of real world
opportunities already: tech industry, startups, academic research. In
contrast, if you are a student in Russia or China and your goal is to get into
a US Ph.D. program or to work in a place like Google or Facebook, ICPC is a
great opportunity to make yourself stand out.

Keep in mind that a large fraction of the top IMO/IOI students from around the
world move to the US for college, so there's plenty of talent in the top US
colleges. There is just no motivation.

One other factor is support from the university. Places like MIT/Stanford
don't care much about ICPC. The coaches are usually other students that are
former contestants, working on a volunteer basis. On the other hand, a place
like St.Petersburg ITMO cares a lot about ICPC, because it gives them bragging
rights.

(Source: I've studied both abroad and in the US and I've been a contestant.)

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StephenFalken
For those wishing to try and submit the problems, there is an online judge
containing the ACM-ICPC World Finals since 2012 till 2015 [1].

[1] [https://icpc.kattis.com/problems](https://icpc.kattis.com/problems)

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GerardoGarzon11
My college finished in the 125th position. At least we participated.

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jameskozart
Russian programmers are the best!

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dschiptsov
Igor Sysoev or Antirez won zero show-off competitions.

If it is an attempt to proclaim something like "Russian programmers are the
greatest" nationalistic bullshit here - it is just pathetic.

