<p>It appears that the talent pool of MIT and Stanford are getting a little dry in the last 20 years. Teams of computer geeks from United States have not won international collegiate programming competition in more than a decade(ACM</a> International Collegiate Programming Contest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). In the just concluded 'Battle of the brains' tournament, teams from the US, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Connell were pushed out of the medal podium (ICPCWiki:</a> Results). I am not sure whether our talents are getting thin or our computer education is not so good after all.</p>
<p>Or perhaps computer science standards are strengthening in the East.</p>
<p>Thanks for the links. Seems like North America completely dominated until 1999. Then something happened…</p>
<p>“Programming” is a very different skill than “computer science”.</p>
<p>Winning competitions doesn’t always mean great talent, not winning doesn’t always mean no talent. Just saying.</p>
<p>Interesting! Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology came in at #36 - higher ranking than UIUC, UChicago, UT, UVa etc.</p>
<p>"Winning competitions doesn’t always mean great talent, not winning doesn’t always mean no talent. Just saying. "</p>
<p>I certainly agree with that. By analogy, Nobel prize winners in science are not always better scientists than non-Nobel winners (if judged by how many papers were published). Fields medalists are not necessarily better mathematicians than non medalists (If judged by how much funding was obtained). IMO gold medalists are not necessary better math talents than students that don’t make AIME (if judged by how many “advanced” community college math classes have been taken).</p>
<p>Be dismissive as much as you can, and wait for more programming outsourcing coming.</p>
<p>Well, the countries that win, like Russia, Poland, and China are also really good at these contests, and they have a lot more support in the country level in resources and coaching and stuff, so it’s not surprising that they do so well. The same is true for IOI results, the US is usually third at best. Like, I have a friend from Romania who said that she learned Djikstra and Dynamic Programming in her high school, and that was required for everyone, which is a LOT compared to schools in the US. Also, at the college-level, contests aren’t emphasized as much as in high school, I think most people try harder on research? And for some reason, ACM doesn’t seem to be well publicized in MIT; I didn’t see anyone at the contest that decided the team that I knew from the USACO training camp.</p>
<p>I’m totally down with programming being outsourced. Programming is terribly boring and something that I have zero interest in doing. Computer science, however…</p>
<p>Sorry for confusing programming with computer science. Of course, they are two very different disciplines that demand different skills.</p>
<p>I suppose what I meant to say is that one needs to consider how programming standards have changed in foreign countries in the past two decades relative to the US.</p>
<p>Uh, I just want to emphasize that this contest actually goes pretty deep into algorithms and theory and stuff, and that even though they’re called (or at least, I call them) programming contests, there’s a lot more to it than that.</p>
<p>Regardless of the material covered, if you’re not creating anything novel, it’s really just a test of recall.</p>
<p>No test means everything, but it actually looks like a very interesting exam. You have to program something on the fly, and it is geared toward science and engineering applications. </p>
<p>I thought MIT won the contest a few years ago, though, when the team was anchored by a Putnam fellow who had been working in MIT’s computer lab since he was 10.</p>
<p>Perhaps the USA outsourcing so many programming jobs to other countries has something to do with this ‘talent thinning’? US used to be at the forefront of techonology, and yet is now starting to seriously lag behind…</p>
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<p>I think in saying this, you’ve given essentially the correct answer (at least according to my guess) as to why programming interest might be lessened. Folks I know in foreign places have considerably more of a programming-centric culture, possibly because a lot of people are forced into it as one of the few ways to a career. Here in the US, at univeresities like yours and mine, things are a little more flexible. </p>
<p>Granted, we aren’t talking about the masses at any country, but some very talented people presumably in this competition, but I think people with lots of talent in both our universities often do something more interesting to them. I took some programming at the beginning of my first year and quit. A friend of mine, in my opinion extremely bright and able, was acing EECS at our school and quit eventually, and wants to do mathematics like me. He survived the programming, then got into theory in CS (complexity theory, etc), then had a cryptography phase, then veered entirely away.</p>
<p>All of us are privileged to be able to make many of the choices we do, I think :)</p>
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<p>Well, to comment a little here, things like a Fields medal are so out there that comparing mathematicians at the level isn’t even worthwhile in my opinion. Sometimes it may depend more on the field of study and what kinds of work is going on there. </p>
<p>That being said, you bring up an important point perhaps indirectly, which is that the presence of these medalists definitely means something right is going on. It has been commented that a detriment to some insane accomplishments is that the U.S. is publish-centric, whereas many other hotspots for mathematics seem to offer less incentive to publish very often. </p>
<p>This is all not immediately relevant, but serves to illustrate that the reason for official awards not being won can be far from a lack of talent, and largely about the “wrong” type of environment being fostered. I don’t have either a positive or negative word to say on the actual topic of the thread, but I do have strong suspicions as to why the observation made holds.</p>
<p>I also think that while programming is not interesting to me, it’s quite a useful thing for many pursuits, and not something I’m going to dismiss myself.</p>