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."

Re:No Indian universities achieved a top ranking?

[Anonymous Coward]

let's bring in nationalism in a CS competetion because you're a short sighted non thinking nerd

Re:No Indian universities achieved a top ranking?

[Bob54321]

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

Could it be that that there are no clear cut top universities for learning to program in India - i.e. they are all reasonable? If that was the case, the programming talent would get spread out and the universities would not progress as far as those who manage to attract all the programming talent in a country. Just a speculation...

Also, what portion of the team members actually are from the country they attend university in?

Go Tsinghua!

[megaduck]

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.

Indians boast much but are miserable performers

[Anonymous Coward]

Indians boast a lot but are actually miserable performers in practically everything, from sports (zero olympic golds) to software. The hindu code coolie or phone answerer is essentially an indentured servant for western corporations, doing grunt work that requires no originality or creative talent.

The indian educational system churns out tons of rote-learning "engineers", 95% of whom are unemployable. Its a pretty pathetic situation.

The dream of every educated indian is to escape from India!

Re:But the judging data was screwed up (again)

[zippthorne]

There is a link to the problem set on the page in the summary. I see no limit of 100 or 64 in any aspect of this problem.

There does a appear to be a limit of 1001 lines *for each test case* however the number of test cases is unspecified.

And besides, since when do you fail to do input validation in the program itself? I know you're trying to save time in a programming contest environment, but if the program comes back with a run-time error, you should really be putting in input validation. Unless you have reason to believe you know what the problem is, in which case, why did you submit early?