<p>I think this programming competitions say something,otherwise the NSA wont be recruiting on Top Coder,where incidentally all the top positions are dominated by Russians and Chinese in the individual category.The only highly placed American student is i believe Neal Wu who also placed highly in the IMO.There is NO american student ranked in the top 10 on Top Coder,and i am not convinced that ALL of them are not interested.Could this be the reason why they are finding it so easy to hack into our systems?</p>
<p>The idea that once one focuses on theory,then coding no longer matters is mistaken.And Top Coder problems are not exactly code monkey stuff.</p>
<p>“Will these competitions help them get into grad school or get a better job? No. Will it enrich their understanding of CS, more so than other forms of study would? No.”</p>
<p>I have seen abbreviated CVs from professors (even full professors) listing Putnam fellow or IMO medals as some of the major honors at undergraduate or high school (surprise!). It does help, possibly substantially. Do you ever see a Putnam fellow having difficulty getting into a top math graduate program? There is simply no excuse not to do well in the ACM competition for the US. We have not won the competition for the last 20 years. We suck at the top talent level. Our graduates or dropouts may be good at commercializing technology and may have a clich</p>
<p>Um, there is an American in the top 10 for TopCoder, for Algorithms.</p>
<p>And the US does fairly well in these competitions, (in fact, I believe last year, at the IOI, the US got more gold medals than any other country). We only consistently do worse than Russia and China, both of which have an incredibly strong and publicized culture centered around these contests. And from what I’ve heard about the attitude that people have in China, I’m not not sure if we want to be like them.</p>
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<p>Is there a reason for this?</p>
<p>And yes, there is some theory involved with TopCoder, but there is a lot more theory involved with classes, research, etc. where people spend more time in.</p>
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<p>Umm, I don’t thinks this works the way you think it does. No respectable mathematician is going to say “Oh, so you want to get into a top math graduate program? Well, do well on the Putnam and that’s all you need.” Putnam fellows that get into the top math graduate programs will very likely have multiple other, more relevant, things going for them.</p>
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<p>To add to this, perhaps the reason participation in the Putnam is higher is that a good showing probably would help someone get into a top grad school. Everything matters a lot more when it’s less likely to accomplish something significant in pure mathematics research as an undergrad.</p>
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<p>But math and CS have very different admissions processes, don’t they? In one, it is possible to get into top schools with zero research, and in fact people with more research may get rejected. I think the expectation of CS undergrads to get involved in research is steeper by far. I’m talking about pure math of course.</p>
<p>Further, to the OP, notice that schools like MIT have a better showing at the Putnam than do many other top schools, e.g. U. Chicago, in mathematics. Yet, arguably the hardest to get into program (Harvard) for pure math PhD seems to get plenty of U. Chicago undergrads. It also has gotten many Putnam Fellows, which is to say there are different ways to go about it.</p>
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<p>I think though, that having an insanely good showing on the Putnam CAN get you into a top math program assuming fairly good grades and letters showing promise. In math, acing your standardized testing, having perfect grades, and fairly good letters of recommendation and fairly strong curriculum and direction can help you a lot more than attempted research. The Putnam is just a better way than standardized tests.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that in math, once you show you can handle hardcore material, the only other things you can really do are: show you can publish stuff in a way that suggests you’ll be a leading researcher in field X (or do something other than publishing to show this), or show you’re just really really quick a thinker (which doesn’t hurt because a lot of PhD prelims are very hard). </p>
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<p>I am a bit more on your side than other posters. I have no interest in competitions myself, but I do find it strange we haven’t done great.</p>
<p>Given that people put a lot of effort into the Putnam, I’d need extra convincing why there isn’t similar effort going into this stuff. As a pure math person, I can safely say the Putnam is quite far from what a ‘real mathematician’ does. So the argument that the contest for CS isn’t ‘real CS’ doesn’t do it.</p>
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<p>While I acknowledge this, it is easy to assume too quickly that it is a difference of cultures rather than a lack of talent, is it not? I don’t think we’ve answered the OP’s question about why the Putnam gets so much effort from some schools, but the same schools with top CS programs don’t apparently put much effort into the programming competition.</p>
<p>If we have, well there was a lot to read, and I didn’t do it carefully enough clearly :)</p>
<p>I think I believe phantasmagoric about Stanford, though. It seems even with the Putnam, while they have placed in the top schools several times, MIT seems to place higher generally and also places in the top few with more exceptional consistency.</p>
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<p>Different discussion, I think. Top competition programming talent is a discussion for the very select few. Realistically, a lot of H1b employees are nowhere near that, and that discussion is more along the lines of who has better average technical competence. It seems to me that this depends a lot on the culture of the nation in consideration. I would agree that US technical skill on average doesn’t seem that hot. But this is almost totally separate from talking about MIT, Stanford, etc - these can attract even the best of the best from foreign nations, and I don’t think they are concerned with the average programmer’s job quite as much.</p>
<p>Guys who score highly on Top Coder or similar competitions seem to get decent internships at tech or even quant finance companies.</p>
<p>Shravas,the only american in the top 10 is the same guy i talked about:Neal<em>wu at#8.The rest of the list is interesting.
1 Petr Russia
2 ACRush China
3 tourist Belarus
4 rng</em>58 Japan
5 UdH-WiNGeR Russia
6 bmerry South Africa
7 lyrically Japan
8* neal_wu US
9 Egor Russia
10 tomek Poland</p>
<p>It appears Eastern Europe and Russia get a bulk of the top spots. However a person from S. Africa is there. Do we normally expect them to perform better in programming? Seems to be a mix of individual ability and the country you come from. Like I really am not surprised by Eastern Europe/Russia’s level of representation, but at the same time S. Africa is a surprise to me (again, I don’t know if it should be).</p>
<p>And it is the same story with Google code jam</p>
<p>I took a closer look at the detail results. The MIT team appeared to take a bad strategy by attempting to solve problem H 12 times and failed. They need a better coach there.</p>
<p>underarchiever,</p>
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<p>I’ve also seen professors list “Who’s Who” on their CVs; just because they list it doesn’t mean that it helped them in their endeavors, only that they are proud of the achievement. I don’t know how it works in math, but in CS I can almost guarantee that these competitions have little to no weight in admissions. Why? Because things like recommendations, research, GPA, etc. all say far more about your knowledge and abilities to do original research than a competition placement can.</p>
<p>mathboy said it right:</p>
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<p>I don’t know about grad admission for math, but for CS, research is required. That’s partly because you can do CS research after taking just the intro classes. If you look at departments’ websites for CS PhD, they always say that the most important factors are recommendations and research.</p>
<p>As an aside, many of them also explicitly say that undergrad institution is important. I’d much rather come from an undergrad that PhD schools are really familiar with and that doesn’t do well in these random CS competitions, than to go to a school that’s less likely to help me in grad admissions and that happens to field teams that place well in these competitions.</p>
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<p>I can guarantee you that the top CS schools have students who are far more brilliant than those who place in these ACM competitions. </p>
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<p>We are not dependent on them in the slightest. The majority still come from the US. The only reason that we draw more from abroad is that, as is well-acknowledged, it’s cheap talent. We can attract them to the US on lower pay and still get the job done.</p>
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<p>Those rankings have been debunked several times. Nobody takes them seriously because they’re obviously biased toward Asian universities: they dominate in the top rankings, when no other international ranking puts them that high. Those “objective criteria” are chosen and weighted in ways that they know will favor Asian universities, which is why they will come out ahead of Caltech, Harvard, etc. It’s the same reason people had difficulty taking the QS rankings seriously when they came out - because universities in the UK (where the ranking originated) disproportionately place at the top. Anyone can create a ranking that will favor their regional universities.</p>
<p>But the majority of international rankings - the ones that people find credible - don’t have half of the top 20 in Asia. And when you look at single objective criteria on their own (without making a composite score, which can be influenced easily by weighting factors in your favor), Stanford and other US universities beat Tsinghua and NUS hit-for-hit: research productivity, citations, faculty strength, selectivity, etc.</p>
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<p>Unlikely, given that salaries will still remain competitive and people will want to stay in the US anyway. They aren’t going to flock to Singapore because they perceive them to be better there. This isn’t American nationalism; this is based on the objective fact that people prefer to stay in the US, and people around the world more often would prefer to be in the US as well. Other countries have to worry about brain drain, but unless there’s some huge cultural change and the US takes a nosedive (unlikely), then we won’t have to worry about that.</p>
<p>mathboy,</p>
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<p>Well, we’ve addressed the reasons - the only thing now is to decide which is most likely. To me, it’s much harder to swallow that these schools are just inferior in attracting smart CS people. From my own experience, I know that students in general don’t care about these competitions; you barely ever hear anything about them at Stanford. And the people on Stanford teams that have competed (I know most of them personally) aren’t, well, the most brilliant CS people. The ones who would kill in these competitions really can’t be bothered and are busy doing other more enriching activities.</p>
<p>The Putnam is a very old, prestigious competition. ICPC? Never even heard of it, and I did my undergrad at a top CS school and am attending a top CS PhD program. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I think that I am somewhat representative of other CS students as well. ICPC is just not on CS students’ radar like the Putnam is on math students’. Hence, the difference in culture.</p>
<p>I’m not even trying to defend Stanford/MIT because of affiliation, no; if they placed well (even at the top) in these competitions, I would still say that there isn’t a culture of participating in these competitions in CS as is the case for math.</p>
<p>The list of schools that place also support this cultural notion: most of the schools there are pretty unknown, and there is no uniformity in perceived quality of the universities. So it seems largely random as to who places: some schools will work hard to field strong teams, others won’t. I just have difficulty believing that, say, UMichigan, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and U Waterloo are somehow systematically better at attracting the strongest CS students than the top CS schools like MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, Cornell, UIUC, Washington, Caltech. Which seems the only alternative if you don’t accept that differences in culture leads to some schools trying hard to field strong teams, and others not. Doesn’t that seem suspect when virtually none of the perennial top CS schools place teams well, or even compete at all (only 2 of those I just listed actually had a team)?</p>
<p>I think that in several years, when things like ICPC become well-known and prestigious, you probably will see more of the top CS schools fielding strong teams, and placing well. In the meantime, there’s not much info to be drawn from the results.</p>
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<p>All the more reason to believe my point about culture: Russia perennially competes in every competition out there. Look at all the international science olympiads. Of course, they do well because they have lots of brilliant students, but there also seems to be a greater emphasis in Russia on competing in student academic competitions than in other countries. This emphasis goes all the way back to the 50s and 60s, when the first student competitions started in math and in linguistics. Russia was one of the first, if not the first, to start these competitions and has emphasized competing in them since.</p>
<p>As a parallel: for the past few decades, international linguistics competitions have gone on in Eastern Europe, with Russia dominating. Then 4 years ago, a few people in the US got some companies to sponsor our own US-based competition in linguistics, to find smart US students for a team. Since then, the US has placed #1 every year in the international linguistics olympiad, beating Russia.</p>
<p>It always comes down to culture - across an entire country or within universities themselves.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’ll agree with your point on my quote there as I studied Russian Science in a course the past semester (I decided to make it the focus of my research paper in my intro. Russian history course). They seem to have a more interesting culture of “popular science”. It tends to bleed much more into what I guess I would refer to as the “public sphere” (you know, as opposed to just educational institutions and various public and private research venues perhaps not directly associated w/ed. institutions). Science just has a greater importance in society as a whole for a myriad of historical reasons. The fact that we don’t have this intense type of culture is not necessarily, as we our culture (in the intellectual sense) is oriented toward many fields. It is in Russia too, but our orientation seems to manifest itself kind of differently. Like, in the US, having civic duties and a high level of civic engagement seems to be a priority among talented youth (HS students, college students), and our society in general. Basically, it seems to be “How many types of ways can our academic interests directly help society?” Or sometimes civic interests take on a life that many would consider separate from academic interests (think of all the ECs we do in HS, many as resume boosters, but many are genuine). It would make sense that many students (of course including the very best) here would prioritize their research or civic/community engagement projects over these high or low profile competitions. However, I have to wonder if this sort of obligation to “civic” duty is emphasized as much in other countries, or are many of them really more “careerist”. And yes, I do consider those in the US careerist, but I have to wonder if “competing” countries are moreso that way. The documentary I watched had some commentators from say India suggest this to be the case because of the relative lack of social mobility vs. that in the US. Given that, many find it necessary to have a math/science related job to live even close to comfortably. Here, many fields would get you what they would consider “comfort” (this also raises the idea that the US may be moreso complacent than ignorant about the “competition”). And then “comfort” is often redefined here. For example: the people that decide: “I’m gonna go help orphans in Africa”). Given a reasonably strong presence of anti-intellectualism (in many forms) in the US, our civic oriented nature is kind of interesting (however, American anti-intellectualism is really complex. In some contexts, civic duty may be valued over "intellectualism).</p>
<p>I’m basically saying that the U.S. may have a different culture for various reasons. And the question is, should we indeed become more like these other countries (give the nature of our economic brackets and the degree of social mobility, why would we?) for the sake of being able to compete with them (rather in these competitions or for jobs). I’m thinking moreso than completely changing the culture, we could benefit from great improvements in education systems preceding higher education (after going through a really sketchy school system, I truly believe this is the case. Not only that, but I know my district is not in the minority. And that’s the sad part).</p>
<p>If one follows phantasmagoric’s logic,we would just have to sit back and sing "How great are we!"Alas,this aint true.China recently surpassed the US as the most innovative country in IT.While these publications may still not have as much impact as the US’s,it shows that they are doing something right,and the US is not.These guys are beating us in programming contests and will soon beat us in research too.Regarding programming competitions as useless is one step to ceding territory.
<a href=“http://blogs.forbes.com/matthewherper/2011/05/25/the-most-innovative-countries-in-information-technology/[/url]”>http://blogs.forbes.com/matthewherper/2011/05/25/the-most-innovative-countries-in-information-technology/</a></p>
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<p>No, I am saying that empirical measures of “how great” different countries show that the US is still ahead (in terms of their universities). I never said or implied that we should just sit back, do nothing, and still expect to be great - you drew that from your own logic, not mine.</p>
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<p>According to some measure or another. By other measures, the US is still the most innovative in IT. And in the end, the indisputable IT capital of the world is Silicon Valley. And that’s in the US, not China.</p>
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<p>Do you even realize what an illogical conclusion this is? “Because they’re doing something right, the US must be doing something wrong” - the world is not black and white.</p>
<p>As your article notes, China produces more IT research - not unexpected, considering that the population in China is more than 4x as large as the US population. But as your article also notes, US research is far more highly cited, i.e. has a much greater impact. It’s the same difference found in research expenditures of US universities: some spend tons more and produce tons more research than others, but it’s not nearly as highly cited as other universities that spend way less and produce less. You can produce all the research you want, but in the end of the day, if it isn’t high-quality research, then it’s not as useful. Now that’s not to say that China’s IT research is useless (far from it), but to claim that China has “surpassed the US as the most innovative country” is misleading when clearly the US is producing higher quality research. That is the definition of innovation: research that, well, innovates (and is thus highly cited), not just research in and of itself.</p>
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<p>Well that’s a hop, skip, and a jump if I ever saw one.</p>
<p>For one, they are only “beating” us in programming contests because most top CS schools are not even bothering to field teams. For another, there is no established link between innovative research and participation in competitions based on toy problems. Russia, among others, has long beat the US in a variety of competitions, yet the US still dominates in research in those areas. In fact, I see the opposite link that you’re trying to make, as I said above and I’ll say again: these students are not competing in CS competitions because they don’t care about them (they bring no monetary benefit, no real glory, no academic benefit) and because they are focused on other, more enriching endeavors like real research. Thus, their lack of placement in these competitions, I think, is because the smartest CS students - who ultimately drive innovation - are engaged in research, not preparing for some random competition. And the competition results corroborate that point: the schools that perennially produce the most highly cited CS research are also the ones who don’t place well or who don’t field a team at all. Instead, random unknown universities who aren’t even on the map in CS research field teams of students who then compete.</p>
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<p>As soon as you can show how programming competitions and IT innovation are linked, I’ll start to take that point seriously. In the meantime, I - and most serious CS students - will continue to try to produce important research rather than waste time on a competition that gives me no benefit nor adds any benefit to IT innovation.</p>
<p>Conclusion: it’s true that there is reason to believe that the US needs to take additional measures to remain competitive, but all this hype about China overtaking the US is overblown and frankly tiresome to hear about. The situation is not nearly as dire as the media makes it sound - it’s all sensationalism meant to incite the public. Clearly you’ve fallen prey to it.</p>
<p>Your argument that top schools have no interest in these competitions is false.Stanford has a page and coaches devoted to programming contests.They even have a local programming contest.The best students from these contest represent Stanford at ACM ICPC contest.Heck,facebook wont be sponsoring it if it meant nothing!
[Stanford</a> Local Programming Contest :: Schedule](<a href=“http://cs.stanford.edu/group/acm/SLPC/schedule.php]Stanford”>http://cs.stanford.edu/group/acm/SLPC/schedule.php)</p>
<p>If you read what I said a few posts back, I acknowledged that the competitions are heard of at Stanford but almost nobody pays attention to them. Having attended Stanford for a few years immersed in the CS culture, I can tell you: the students generally have no interest in them. They’d much rather conduct research, work at a tech company, create their own startup, etc. than train for a competition. This is to be expected given that Stanford’s at the heart of Silicon Valley. Much more interesting things to do.</p>
<p>And saying that my “argument that top schools have no interest in these competitions is false” and then following it with a single data point - Stanford - does not refute my statement. Since you seem reluctant to do the work, I’ll do it for you: </p>
<p>Of the top 25 CS schools, these are the ones that fielded a team and placed:</p>
<p>MIT (27)
CMU (13)
Princeton (42)
Michigan (2)</p>
<p>Of the top 25 CS schools, these are the ones that fielded a team but did not place, i.e. got an honorable mention:</p>
<p>UIUC
UW-Madison
UCSD
UMD</p>
<p>Of the top 25 CS schools, these are the ones that did not field a team, did not do ICPC, and/or did not get an honorable mention:</p>
<p>Stanford
Cornell
U Washington
UT Austin
Georgia Tech
Caltech
Columbia
Harvard
U Penn
Brown
Purdue
Rice
UMass-Amherst
UNC-Chapel Hill
USC
Yale</p>
<p>As should be apparent, for the majority of top CS schools, either the students there have no interest in the competitions (they don’t field a team), or the students participating in them are not the most brilliant CS students they have to offer.</p>
<p>Now ask yourself which is more likely: the perennial CS heavyweights, like Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT, CMU, etc. are just inferior to U Michigan, Nizhny Novgorod State University, University of Waterloo, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Saratov State University, etc. in their ability to attract strong CS students. Or, the students at the former are just less interested in the competitions, to the extent that they field a team of students who are the “weaker” CS students at the school, or they don’t bother to field a team at all.</p>
<p>Which do you think it is? If you reject both, the only conclusion to be made is that the US simply has far fewer brilliant CS students than Argentina, Canada, or Russia. Which could not possibly be true, given that the majority of brilliant CS people in academia are from the US - and by “brilliant” I mean they produce the most highly-cited, important research. The mere notion that there aren’t many brilliant CS students in the US is just absurd in and of itself; not because it’s the US, but because every country will have its share of brilliant CS students, and the US has proven itself in innumerable ways to be the “king” of CS research. If you contest this, well I think we can see how much you know about global CS research.</p>
<p>Thus, since that can’t be true, and since it’s unlikely that the universities that place well are somehow superior to the top CS schools in attracting strong CS students, the only conclusion I can make is that the students at some universities are just more interested in the competitions than students at others. At most, in fact, the students just don’t care. (From personal experience, I can say this is the case at Stanford.)</p>
<p>If any of the above is illogical, please point out where and offer an explanation of your own. If you have an objection, provide solid logic for why it’s wrong and, wherever possible, data supporting your alternative. If you can’t do this, then don’t respond at all, because you’re going in circles at this point.</p>
<p>Check the 2010 ACM ICPC and most of the top CS schools participated,but were floored by Russia and China.</p>
<h1>5.Stanford</h1>
<h1>6 Cornell</h1>
<h1>13.CMU</h1>
<h1>17.MIT</h1>
<p>I guess they were just not interested enough to come out tops,right?
<a href=“http://icpc2010.csc.kth.se/index.html[/url]”>http://icpc2010.csc.kth.se/index.html</a></p>