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Comment by eastWestMath | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I’ve always been a bit leery of code competitions. I saw a lot of undergrads spend a lot of effort on these contests, and I was never convinced it was the best use of their time (especially because the university I did my graduate studies at had a professor who put a lot of effort into running the competitive programming club).

I think a group of 15-20 bright and enthusiastic CS students under the guidance of a tenured CS professor could accomplish a lot with the time/effort they were spending and learn just as much!

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There are some good things about coding competitions, if done well:

* Introduction of developers to a core kit of useful algorithms

* Practical examples for developers to design algorithms that require adaptation (e.g., how to adapt the bipartite matching algorithm to tripartite)

* Training people in how to debug their code--the most useful competitions are the ones where programmers don't always have access to the computer, so you have to be able to step through your code without running it

At the same time, however, I think there is rapidly diminishing returns here. You'll get a lot of the first bit of effort you put into programming competitions, but then the improvement you get is incredibly incremental. I'm especially unimpressed by race-to-the-finish kind of competitions, since I think the skills it requires to get very high on the leaderboards are not useful.

These are all, of course, things one should learn in an algorithms class.

CodeJam is practically just an extended version of algorithm/data struct class.

Such contests seem to be just a fun way to get students interested in algorithmics. Many of those who become passionate about Computer Science due to competitive programming go on to get PhD in CS and contribute with their research. Some highlights among Code Jam winners: Tiancheng Lou (won Code Jam in 2008 and 2009, went on to earn his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Marek Cygan (won Code Jam in 2005, earned his PhD from University of Warsaw in 2012, currently start-up co-founder and CTO), Gennady Korotkevich (won Code Jam 8 times between 2014-2022, as of 2019 was a PhD student at ITMO University) (sources: Wikipedia and Linkedin)

The first two have published some influential works during their academic careers:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=df8TSy4AAAAJ

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Vjo4Tg4AAAAJ

I wonder what the total number of research papers and citations of all Code Jam winners would be. Sadly, it's hard to find reliable info on most of them.

There is no correlation between a person's ability to solve such problems and his ability to do research.

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