<p>It appears that the talent pool of Stanford is 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 International Collegiate Programming Contest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). In the just concluded 'Battle of the brains' tournament, teams from the US, including MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Carnegie-Mellon, Connell were pushed out of the medal podium (ICPCWiki: Results). I am not sure whether our talents are getting thin or our computer education is not so good after all. No wonder Google gets spanked by Baidu in China.</p>
<p>This is a ■■■■■ attempt, right?</p>
<p>Google gets spanked by Baidu because of the cultural rift and Google’s lackluster search results from character-based languages like Chinese. Baidu understands the Chinese people and warms up to the government, which Google only did grudgingly.</p>
<p>[Where</a> Google Loses | Foreign Policy](<a href=“http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/29/where_google_loses]Where”>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/29/where_google_loses)</p>
<p>Also, your logic makes no sense. If Baidu and other international companies/programmers are kicking so much ass, why do Google and other US-based companies still reign supreme in Europe and the Americas?</p>
<p>■■■■■■ go away</p>
<p>Winning computer programming contests (games) are a function of who wants to enter. In most cases the serious computer science major does not enter these contests. </p>
<p>All I can say is this. My son is a junior at Stanford and minoring in Computer Science. He has been a TA for a couple introductory CS courses. The networking of Stanford alums and students is extensive. He gets at least one email every week from companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere asking him to work for them. Even in this economy, a Stanford degree in computer science is priceless. </p>
<p>Harvardfan, what college is Connell? You bring pride to the Ivy League.</p>
<p>I would agree with what was mentioned in the above post about a lot of it being about who is actually participating in the competitions. I am stanford CS, and the smartest CS major I knew here did nothing but ace his classes and play video games. He really has an incredible mind for algorithms, but we could never convince him to participate in any competitions.</p>
<p>The rest of it is that I think American universities (especially Stanford) don’t create an undergraduate experience that is solely focused on technical matters, which (as I understand it) many of the top technical schools abroad do. I’ll take our more balanced approached to education every time–we may not win every programming competition, but in the long run I imagine its probably a good thing.</p>