Rarg. Rarg. Rarg. Rarg.
Did Sony/Polyphony even PLAY their own game before inflicting it on us??? How is it that I can't win a 1-pt race even though I'm much better than the AI?? Oh, right! Because you put one SUPERCAR in with the others and didn't count it in the race difficulty rating! And why can't you give me a rough estimate of how difficult a race will be in my current car so I can choose one that will make it a fair race? Beats ruining my win record and spending 150,000 credits to soup up a car totally unfit for that series.
Hey computing world! Just because the US got 17th in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Championship does NOT imply the US as a whole is falling behind the world in math and computer science. As someone who has done a fair amount of competition programming, those contests measure a specific set of skills. More importantly, these skills can be improved with practice and may or may not correlate with ability to do actual productive work. Finally: few US universities train specifically for these contests, unlike the schools who win year after year. And I hate to use this word, but: a sample size of ONE TEAM does NOT make stastical significance, especially when you're looking at a country the size of the USA! SO PLEASE SHUT UP ABOUT IT. (Yes ACM, I'm looking at you.)
Wish I had more. >_> There, that's out of my system.
follow on Mastodon
follow with Feedly
RSS for the rest
That's it! Feel the BURN!
ANGST
As someone who competed in the ICPC world finals in Hawaii, and got in the bottom third... well, I have no point. I just wanted to brag that I got to go to Hawaii for free, because I'm a jerk. Suckers!
Oh boy, you look angry. "As someone who has done a fair amount of competition programming, those contests measure a specific set of skills". This is so true. I really don't like programming contests that are being hosted here each year. I know a guy who received quite a solid number of points at the republic programming contest round 1. He knows really nothing about how to lay out and manage your source code and especially when it is big, how to create advanced data structures, he knows no neat techniques and I'm not talking about experience in any technologies. He is just good at creating algorithms. So I'm asking: is the quality of a programmer measured only by the way he can write algorythms?! If the answer is yes, I'm going to retire... And yeah, here are special schools as well which take the first places in such contests each year as well :/
i tried one of those topcoder things once and did really bad at it hope this helps
And I'm still bitter that I should have been there too.
lol yes now you are using LJ's for its true purpose!! :D
Countries like Russia and China are motivated to do well in the ACM competitions because for some kids there, it's their only ticket to a better life. (for example, if you want to get into a place like MIT as a foreign student, you sure as hell need some kind of national or internationl recognition in competitions. I wish I knew that, then I would have studied harder for those competitions I was in :P). It's also one way to raise prestige if you're an unknown university. I mean, why would MIT want to be good at ACM programming competition when you're already the world's number 1 institute for science?