

Did Pascal beat C++ at the 2010 International Olympiad in Informatics? - smharris65
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_algorithmolympics/all/1

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scott_s
The question of programming languages used is one of the least interesting
things in that article.

~~~
smharris65
Maybe for some, but for me I was very surprised that the top contestant would
use Pascal and do so well. And when the journalist specifically lists total
lines of code in his article and makes it a point to differentiate the
programming languages of the two contestants it was very interesting to me.

~~~
colomon
But the difference (at least in the example code shown) is entirely in the
choice of algorithm. The better / shorter algorithm just happens to be in
Pascal...

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thisrod
Actually, both programs use the same algorithm, but they represent its flow of
control very differently. The Pascal program could be written elegantly in any
language.

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xyzzyz
I know personally some of the IOI gold medalists, and, as far as I can tell,
they all use C++, though not all of them like it -- it is just that C++ has
STL with set, heap and map, while C and Pascal do not. It is just time saver.

I once knew one crazy guy, who in his free time practiced implementing
algorithms and data structures commonly used in such contests (e.g. AVL trees,
Dijkstra, KMP), just to waste less time writing them down.

~~~
Locke1689
We all do that. Precious time is lost when you have to "figure out" how to
write Dijkstra's in Java/C++. Technically, the ICPC allows you to bring a
print out, but other competitions do not.

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Starmonkey
Just read the article today, which really had nothing to do with language
wars, and everything to do with some really smart kids. I commend all the
participants in these contests, and am a bit jealous of their skills.

I also really didn't like Kolstad's comment about "will he die a virgin." It
reeked of extremely petty jealousy, and was just crass.

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kleiba
There are many disciplines in which many people have become known for their
dedication and commitment: sports. art. music. People who are successful one
of these fields are treated with reverence and respect for their attainment,
and rightfully so. Yet I fear that hackers will forever stay the group where
enthusiasm, talent and determination is met with stereotypical comments like
this:

> “He was ahead for 98 percent of the competition. The question is,” Kolstad
> says slowly and with utter gravity, “will he die a virgin?”

~~~
zck
And that was said by the US coach. He should know better.

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zbanks
This doesn't really translate to anything in the real world.

If the goal is to write code quickly, Pascal does beat C & C++. But there are
tons of other languages that _aren't_ available.

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xentronium
Choice of programming language doesn't matter much in competitive programming.

Say, Pascal (or sometimes Delphi dialect of it) is historically very popular
in Russia / Belarus, it's still a primary language in schools.

However, lots of student teams participating in ACM ICPC moved to Java just
because it has more data structures in its standard library and it can handle
bignums out of the box, meaning you have more time to think about solutions
instead of coding long division.

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Jach
I did a much easier one of these sponsored by a state university with a team
in high school when I was learning Java, it was fun. Though it's ridiculous
that they should limit programming language choice so; it's not like it's hard
to automate compilation/interpreting and diffing even with different
compilers/interpreters. Are people worried that Python may have an "import
problemsolution" available? Guess you should make the problems harder... (Yes,
they can't support everything, but they should at least support a substantial
fraction of languages on say
<http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=statistics> )

~~~
mzl
Actually, it is kind of hard to make a secure solution that takes arbitrary
submitted source code, compiles it, runs it, and finally times it with high
precision. Sandboxing in a VM is unfortunately not feasible since timing is
very hard to do.

And as for the question if this is a legitimate paranoia: yes it is. Many
contestants are very smart, and there have been hacks and security breaches in
high-profile contests.

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hugh3
I don't know, did it? Why ask the question in the headline instead of
answering it?

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coliveira
This is one of the things I dislike most about this forum: people want to
attract attention to their articles by changing titles.

The original title "Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics" is not
much better, but at least describes correctly the subject.

~~~
smharris65
I wasn't trying to attract attention to my post by changing the title. I just
thought it was the most interesting part of the article. I was hoping to get
feedback on why a contestant would be able to compete very well with Pascal
over C++. If I posted using the original title how would I generate that
specific discussion?

~~~
fbcocq
_I was hoping to get feedback on why a contestant would be able to compete
very well with Pascal over C++._

Because that's what he's been practicing with. CS courses in schools in
Eastern Europe are tought in Pascal, or at least used to be.

In the end it's as interesting as the brand of chess pieces at a chess
tournament. If you look at the solutions to Google Code Jam (<http://www.go-
hero.net/jam/10/languages/0>) for example then you'll see that it's mostly
disgusting code made of arrays and loops and you can do those in pretty much
any language. People get good at algorithms by sitting down, learning and
implementing them, not by sweating the choice of language.

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brisance
Wu's solution for the Cluedo puzzle seems inefficient. Could've saved an array
assignment by doing mur[] and wep[] at the same time since they are of the
same length.

Also, there might be a bug in Wu's solution. It seems the first time through
the while loop, the parameters for the Theory function are off by 1. i.e. m=6,
l=10, w=6.

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woan
It's awesome seeing Rob Kolstad as the US coach. Some of remember him
sponsoring the Junior Programming League for high school Plato accounts at the
University of IL in the early mid-80s.

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v21
I kept bumming myself out reading the article by automatically going on and
reading the answer to the problems.

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vgurgov
sweet... reminds me days when i spend hours practicing simple algorithms on
pascal. I bet very few ppl could type something like "for i:=1 to n do begin
end;" faster back in that time...

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radioactive21
You know it's something with math, when almost everyone in the picture is
Asian.

