Program design strength and Internet technology strength: five years ICPC World Finals told me

The 2019 ICPC World Finals ended without any MEDALS for the first time in recent years. This year’s medal winners are:

Since the sponsor of ICPC changed from ACM to JetBrains, it is now just called ICPC, which is a bit strange, but fortunately it is not called JB-ICPC. Russian schools have won the top spot for the eighth year in a row. So what is the relationship between the level of programming at ICPC, or university students, and the development of the Internet in the country? This is what this article wants to discuss.

To this end, I made a simple statistics of the final ranking of the ACM World Finals in the past five years. Each year, the top 12 teams will be awarded MEDALS, with four gold, silver and bronze teams. I counted gold as 3 points, silver as 2 points, bronze as 1 point, and looked at the total score of each country to represent the ICPC programming strength of the students in that country (the figures in the table are the ranking of the universities in that country in that year) :

This is actually very crude because it doesn’t take into account factors such as population size and immigration. In addition, I excluded countries and regions (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, etc.) that won only one medal in those five years.

Next, I looked at the market capitalization of the country’s largest Internet companies as a proxy for the country’s Internet tech prowess:

Taking the X-axis as a ranking of programming prowess and the Y-axis showing the market capitalization of the country’s largest Internet companies, you can draw a picture like this:

We can see that between the three world powers, the more powerful the Internet, the worse the programming ability. Because of the professional programming training provided by Chinese teenagers, many excellent high school students will be admitted by top American universities. Therefore, many American universities have a large number of Chinese students in their teams, such as MIT, which ranked second this year.

Yinzhan Xu’s IOI address is shown as China (this kind of big guy can find the home page just by googling), indicating that he was in China before he was an undergraduate.

So take that out of the equation, and the United States is likely to fall further down the list in programming capabilities, while the gap between China and Russia is too big to catch up. Unfortunately, these are sentimental analyses that cannot be rigorously measured, but they are nonetheless illustrative.

Going back to the conclusion, why do countries with more Internet power have worse programming skills?

In my opinion, college students in countries with strong Internet capabilities are more imaginative and innovative, and more enthusiastic about new technologies. However, excellent college students from countries with low Internet technology strength have no other choices due to the closed environment.

As a retired player, I know the persistence of every ACMer. Many of the best programmers start training at a young age, and it takes a lot of effort to learn programming when you’re just in college. The format of the programming competition is simple, a page of English questions, but it may take a few days to come up with the best method. As a result, visits to the lab became commonplace, and flunking was quite possible. The intensity and intensity of programming training is mind-boggling, and the students who have achieved this are the ones who have spent a lot of time (and hair) on it. Because the time of college life is limited, it is difficult to spare energy to do other things.

Let’s see what the Americans are doing. Looking at the country where the champion schools are located each year, with the exception of the last eight years of Russian domination, the United States seems to have evaporated since 1997:

So what did American students do after they won in 1997?

In the history books, it was during the Dotcom bubble that countless dot-com companies were founded. Many of them died, but there were still many companies that changed the world. For example, among the FAANG five technology giants, Amazon was founded in 1995, Netflix in 1997, and Google in 1998. Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and revived Apple. Therefore, we have reason to believe that the rise of the Internet has opened up so many opportunities for American college students to make products that interact with people, change the world and overturn cognition, which may be more interesting than writing boring algorithm code alone.

When it comes to student entrepreneurs from China and Russia that can make history, it seems that there are still only a few. You might mention Ethereum founder V, but V moved to Canada in 1999, even though he was born in Russia in 1994.

The annihilation of Chinese universities is not necessarily a bad thing. It is reasonable to assume that excellent Chinese college students now have many choices. Academically, there is increasing competition for Chinese students to apply to top universities abroad, with many well-trained undergraduates able to publish high-quality papers. In business, with the encouragement of national innovation and entrepreneurship, students with professional and technical background can gain popularity in the capital market, such as Ele. me and Teambition. Technically, Moore’s Law is driving the hardware revolution, which brings continuous wind: O2O, VR, AI, Blockchain… The rapid iteration of new technology attracts the enthusiasm of young people; In the workplace, there are many students who take advantage of summer and winter internships. They want to get out of the ivory tower of campus and see what people in industry are doing…

Programming is just a choice, there is no right or wrong choice, only suitable and like. It doesn’t matter what other people are doing, it matters what we are doing.

References

• tradingview.com
• En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern…
• Icpc.baylor.edu/community/r…
• www.rbth.com/business/32…
• www.value.today
• Alexa.chinaz.com/Country/ind…