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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain the significance of this competition? I've never heard of it before and am just looking for a little understanding of what, if anything, there is to read into the results.

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Competitive Programming is a sport where teams(or individuals in some instances) compete with each other to solve a set of algorithmic questions in the shortest time. This generally happens on a system called the Online Judge which is basically a system for code evaluation.

ACM ICPC is basically the Olympics of Competitive Programming.

The significance can vary from person to person but sometimes Universities and Companies look favourably at good results in such competitions.

So, like the olympics, the important member organizations put a reasonable enough amount of effort into it to ensure they're represented well? Like, I really should be looking at UCF as a college that produces some of the best programmers in the US?

The members that perform well are those who have the organisations which care. It doesn't necessarily translate to a great CS program at the university. Sometimes teams are also carried by one or two brilliant competitive programmers that crop up from somewhere and then disappear in four years time.

If you attend UCF, join the programming team, and make it to regionals your peers will be some of the best programmers in the US and you will be able to rely on those connections for the rest of your career. Just attending UCF guarantees little.

ACM is the Olympics of programming competitions. It's insanely hard to get into the finals, and winning it means your team is packed with geniuses.

To prepare for it they generally practice either on UVA online judge (1800 problems) or Topcoder.

To see how insanely challenging it is, try to solve even 90 problems out of the first 100:

https://uva.onlinejudge.org/index.php?option=com_onlinejudge...

People do it for fun and bragging rights.

It looks good on the resume, especially if the person reading the resume has been to that kind of competitions too.

So it's taken seriously by universities? Like CalTech really put its best foot forward and got smoked by UCF? And American Universities really are doing this poorly in CS competitions relative to the rest of the world?

UCF is a great example and one that I'm familiar with. UCF has a faculty member that's very involved in their programming contest program. That brings a lot more consistency, probably a little money, makes it easier to recruit students, etc. They have a great library of problems to practice on. They also run a high school programming contest which helps identify talent and recruit, but also helps get more UCF students involved.

When I was at nearby USF, our programming contest teams were student-run. It's not a priority for the department and there is a lot of inconsistency as students come and go. There's also a smaller pool of participants to draw from. We did reasonably well for a little while when I was there and put a bunch of time into it, recruiting, teaching, running practices with and without other unis. But it takes a lot of effort.

It depends. The admissions committee at Caltech might care if a PhD candidate from another country won the contest.

However, Caltech itself doesn't care that much about its team's performance.

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