"An acm day is a day at which you do nothing but pracitce, typically spending 16 hours in practice and sleeping/eating/doing other stuff in 8 hours. For sure, this is not reasonable for our daily lives, but we need to define such a day as it is suitable for feeling progressive."
I don't get it. If it is agreed upon that this acm day is not reasonable or practical, why do we still need to define it and why is it 'suitable for feeling progressive' ?
The beginner/"pupil" curriculum is 28 "days", or 448 study-hours.
Conveniently for comparison, a college course is generally 15-16 weeks long. A 4-credit course would be 4×16 hours classroom hours, so a 4-credit course with 3 study hours per classroom hour would be 12×16 hours.
So the beginner curriculum is equivalent to two and a half of the hardest 4-credit courses in your degree program.
The intermediate/"specialist" curriculum is 37 "days".
I would imagine the "acm day" is both to not scare away the potential student and to actually make designing curricula of that magnitude feasible. (I used to write K-12 curricula professionally, and it's no small task.)
Competitive coding competitions are useful because they force you to exercise some valuable real-world skills: shipping technical solutions on a schedule while prioritising problems of unknown size in order of your own team's abilities.
Under the clock, you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of and usually learn something about algorithms. This sounds a lot like startups.
> shipping technical solutions on a schedule
I strongly disagree. Competitive programming (CP) simply requires you to solve, more often than not, mathematical problems and puzzles. The main focus is on getting the solution as quickly as possible with no regard for the code quality or maintenance.
You face the same problems though. Bad codes are hard to debug and a simple mistake can cause you big time penalty. Some solutions get too complex to implement in time if you write bad codes.
I'm curious; what's the point of competitive programming? It strikes me as opposite to our actual goal of programming in collaboration/the metrics applied do not seem to further the
general quality of our work and output.
You can think of it as a hobby, almost like a sport. It's more about testing your problem solving skills, and ability to apply learned concepts in novel (and sometimes not so novel) ways.
The type of problems found in competitive programming are closer to the sort of things scientists would be looking at, rather than your normal corporate coder. For example, placing lightning detectors to improve accuracy while minimising the number of detectors. This is something that you're unlikely to find in a normal business, but is fun to solve.
The grand idea is that competitive programming helps you view problems from different angles, to chase optimisations, and to practice application of algorithms and data structures.
Also, team programming challenges illustrate delegation of tasks based on strengths, and often require teamwork to solve difficult problems. This collaboration obviously carries over to general work.
Source: I was a competitive programmer in university
I teach several competitive programming high school teams. On one hand, I hate it, for exactly some of the reasons on this thread. On the other hand, high school bands compete for trophys too... who ever thought to have competitive orchestras?
people are competitive, and competitions motivate. They aren't for everybody, but for some, they find it valuable. The competition and the coding ability are two separate life skills, forced together in the crucible of the high school education system.
I cannot criticize the motivation, or the fact that my students in high school can solve problems many professionals I know cannot. I can criticize that the competitive spirit marginalizes some of the groups we need to Encourage more.
Competitive programming is good practice and makes you a better programmer if you solve the problem before you start writing any code and then just implement your solution to prove that it works. This creates good habits and also shows you how trivial it is to implement something once you know what to do.
If you're offering up that analogy yourself, I guess I don't understand why you're asking, "what's the point of competitive programming?"
The point of "competitive _anything_" is The Competition itself. What's the point of competition running?!? Shouldn't running be a utilitarian function of escaping an angry lion in the African savanna? Therefore, what's the point of Usain Bolt competing in sprints?!? It's the competition. Same reasons for competitions in spelling (spelling bees), cooking (Iron Chef), etc. Humans just like to compete.
You don't have to enjoy those competitions to understand why other people participate in them.
Can anyone here explain why is competitive coding used so much in the hiring process. I think while basic things like asymptotic complexity or binary search are sometimes used in real world, I am still to see a problem which uses advanced competitive coding knowledge. Why base so much on a test that is almost surely never used. I am generally good at competitive coding, and I think I will be on the gaining side once I graduate, but still.
Mainly because us interviewers tend towards the sadism end of the spectrum /s
Personally I use it to determine how a candidate approaches a problem. Most of these types of questions have an obvious solution that has a terrible runtime, and then have several optimisation layers on top of that.
I want to see:
* can the candidate reason about a complex problem that has multiple steps.
* are they able to offer a basic solution in pseudo-code (the dreaded "whiteboard" section).
* can they analyse their own solution, for example expected runtime, optimisations, etc (also how they handle criticism)
* how would they go about testing their solution - that is, what test cases would they use to verify their solution is correct (along with this, what error checking would they do)
There are no 'right' answers to these questions - it's about the process.
> I am still to see a problem which uses advanced competitive coding knowledge
In my work I've found it's not about applying a clever hack: its about recognising patterns and learning which algorithm/data-structure is appropriate, and how to apply it effectively. Just like in a competition.
> There are no 'right' answers to these questions - it's about the process.
Isn't this the whole point of this. The answer is obviously correct or not. Yes, there may be more than one correct, but saying "there are no 'right' answers" seems plain wrong in this situation to me.
I don't get it. If it is agreed upon that this acm day is not reasonable or practical, why do we still need to define it and why is it 'suitable for feeling progressive' ?