Is America's IT dominance under threat?
Published: 20 Apr 2005 15:15 BST
What's measured in the ACM programming contest?
The problems are not simply, as the title sounds like, 'Write a program to do factorial fast.' It's more problem-solving than that. One of them had to do with a mobile phone tower. You had to cover this many people, so where would you place your mobile phone tower, or something like that.
What are the origins of the contest?
Since ACM has been around so long, it started off as a local programming contest and then it expanded to be nationwide and then international. Education was a big part of the ACM mission. Since computers were brand new, one of the big challenges was going to be to teach people how these use them. So this was kind of a natural thing to do for this volunteer organisation. Somebody thought it would be nice to have a programming contest.
What's happened in the last 10 or 15 years is information technology has been spreading through a bunch of these countries, many of which do not have great economies and find information technology very attractive. It's not capital intensive. It's a non-polluting technology. And nations think of themselves as good at things. If you think you're good at math and science — like the Russians, I think, do, and Indians and Chinese — if they think, 'Gee this is something we're good at,' IT becomes a target.
As result of your story, I've gotten feedback about how seriously this is taken. I'm told in Russia... the contest couldn't be taken more seriously.
That's one of the questions I had: Is it taken more seriously in other places?
Yeah. As far as I know there's no steroid that you can take to make you a faster programmer. (But) you had the feeling it's almost like East Germany was with the swimmers — it was national pride how well they did in the Olympics. Well, apparently Russia takes it so seriously… that success in the programming contest affects the funding of local schools. Those that are more successful in the programming contest get more funding.
The programming contest is now like (the World Cup). It's not just a national competition. You get to measure yourself against everybody in the world.
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