by RMG
My favorite undergrad extracurricular activity made the New York Times today, where Thomas Friedman uses it as a warning about slipping US technical competitiveness in the global market:
On April 7, CNET News.com reported the following: “The University of Illinois tied for 17th place in the world finals of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. …
“That’s the lowest ranking for the top-performing U.S. school in the 29-year history of the competition. Shanghai Jiao Tong University of China took top honors this year, followed by Moscow State University and the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics. Those results continued a gradual ascendance of Asian and East European schools during the past decade or so. A U.S. school hasn’t won the world championship since 1997, when students at Harvey Mudd College achieved the honor. ‘The U.S. used to dominate these kinds of programming Olympics,’ said David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘Now we’re sort of falling behind.’ ”
Now, I don’t know how general US technical education compares to other countries’, but this is a pretty weak piece of negative evidence. I was in the ACM ICPC World Finals in 2003, and my (American) team had a mediocre performance, placing in the middle of the pack. Our coach knew the winning (or second place, I don’t remember) team from Eastern Europe; IIRC they spent about an order of magnitude more time training and preparing for the competition than we did. It seems to me quite possible that, given the well-known educational pressures in some other countries, the difference in ACM ICPC performance says less about the quality of technical education (anybody at the World Finals thoroughly understood all the relevant algorithmic principles involved in the problems) in the US vs. elsewhere as the differing levels of willingness to spend large amounts of time preparing for the competition, far in excess of the level where it has spillover benefits for your general ability as a computer scientist. To some extent this plays into Friedman’s thesis that Americans are lazy and complacent, but it’s possible that in some instances this is a `rational laziness’. I know I, at least, spent a lot of time that year pursuing my own interests that I could have spent doing every problem in the history of the ACM competition or something equally pointless, and I think I’m a better scientist for it.
Update: From the NYT article on the 2003 finals I referred to above:
Many of the teams had been preparing for the contest with the dedication of triathletes, practicing several hours a day. Some schools even devote entire courses to duplicating the conditions, time constraints and types of problems found at the contest….
“We wouldn’t be here unless we planned to win,” said Jan Madey, coach of the Warsaw University team, with the intensity one would sooner expect in a trainer of Olympic gymnasts. He brought his team over a week before the contest, he said, so they would be able to shake off any lingering jet lag and relax.
Were one to judge the state of computer science education solely by this year’s contestants, the best students would appear to be in Eastern Europe and China, not Cambridge, Mass., home to M.I.T., or California, where the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University have traditionally dominated computer education, and definitely not Japan, which had only two teams in the finals.
Some attribute that geographical distribution to the seriousness with which students overseas approach programming contests. The Russian, Polish, Chinese and Canadian teams have been practicing at least 10 hours a week for more than six months, with particular emphasis on the time pressure. Weekly or twice-weekly mock contests gauge their progress.
“You need a lot of practice, like playing the piano,” said Mr. Yang, who has been competing in programming contests since high school. “You have to face the computer every day and solve a lot of problems.”