You are greatly exaggerating it when you say that it is “integral part of education system” in Russia.
Most of children don’t face it at all during their school years, except of those who attend one of the very few specialized schools which put it into their course (and to me it feels like there are maybe 10 such schools over whole country), or they are doing it on their own.
I’m from Ukraine, and situation here is generally similar. I didn’t know about competitive programming almost till the end of 10th grade - so I discovered it a bit over a year before finishing school.
And in my case the reason was not education system, but huge effort on popularization of this activity by guys from the university which I later enrolled - they were ICPC Gold medalists a year before that and they did their best to promote competitive programming.
Mate, it’s still better than India. I got to know about arrays at the end of 12th grade!!. I still wish i had got to know about competitive programming earlier.
@vijju123 I clearly emphasized on giving equal privileges to coders of all countries, so as to attract best coders to increase competition, and those 10-20 coders most of the times goes upto rank 80-100, and indian users coming in top-10 in codechef will not even come in top-50 if the good coders start competing at codechef as you can see from codeforces standings of any competition, none of them makes in the top-50.
As a person from outside India I can say that what you pointed out isn’t among important reasons why a lot of strong contestants from outside India don’t participate in CodeChef contests.
Yep; that describes my subjective point of view - on one hand, I may be wrong about some stuff on that list; on the other hand - I already understand that I even missed a few more points there; and since I got several people messaging me with “You just wrote down what everybody had in mind but didn’t want to say” I believe I got it mostly correct.
I think training is the key word here, and training not just for ICPC but also for science Olympiads. I guess some of the high rated programmers are medallist in some science Olympiads. I read some blogs on CodeForces where some people mentioned that transitioning to CP(competitive programming) after preparing for math Olympiad for several years was easy.
I dont want every school going student to participate in CP(as the curriculum is very bulky in india) but they all can at least have a strong foundation in maths before trying CP, and they can have it by preparing for Olympiads.
Yes, it seems that one reason is that strong math background itself is really, really helpful in CP, and other reason is that having general experience with spending a lot of time on preparation to competition (it may be some other discipline, not even math) often leads to having better self-discipline and being more hardworking during training for CP.
Well, 7 stars arent manufactured somewhere that we can increase that rapidly lol XD
In a cut throat competition, yes your point stands that 7 star people will work hard. But I think thats it . It may not be the best/most-efficient step for helping to 5 and 6 stars to be 7 stars.
Regarding latter half of your answer,I will say it illustrates the fault in thinking of majority of coders. Let me ask-
“WHY ARE YOU WAITING TO BE SPOONFED?” Internet,resources,everything is at your hand! Look, we can provide the spark to set the fire, after that its on you. We cannot,and SHOULD not, spoonfeed
@o_0 , think a little more on your suggestion. There are many downsides of it as well, and it further promotes the issue of “Losing motivation.” And as I said, I dont see it affecting bulk in any way. We have to take steps so that more people are well versed with CP, there are more good coders from country- for this we need something which affects the bulk. I hope my point came across clearly, thanks!
@taran_1407-Blaming the education system that much isnt correct, and not productive in my opinion (since we cannot do anything about that). They feel schools should focus of development side of CS (teaching things like Word, Excel in detail for future use, focusing on principle of OOPS in programming etc) and are not wrong in holding those views either. They are just different from ours.
Ultimately the main factors are awarenesss and incentive. If you didnt know arrays till class 12th,then we should treat it as awareness issue than education system. They cant include everything in syllabus
From @lebron 's answer, I think one of the major difference is interaction of people with top coders, and frequency of camps. While I dont know exact number of camps held per year, I can definitely say that they arent much in frequency- and if they are- then again, awareness issue is grave here.
Basically increasing rewards. Yes, the points you said are valid.Not sure to what degree they are implementable, but the concerns are worth addressing.
On site competitions face some issues. Like, proper arrangements for venue, some candidates not coming due to high travelling costs etc.
And we cant say “There arent enough contests held” as well. Join enough number of sites, theres a contest going on at one site or other 85% of time.
The issue boils down to, again, we can only spoonfeed you that much. After that if you lose motivation, or loce incentive, then we cannot do much about it.
Like, in your argument- why are you favoring onsite contest over online ones? One contest or other keeps happening, but not many will participate diligently. Thats the problem. We can provide spark for fire, but thats it.
@lebron okay I may have exaggerated but I only said this because that’s what I heard from other top coders. But still the amount of awareness and enthusiasm about CP in Russia is much greater than in India.
Onsite contests tend to boost motivation much more. Also for a lot of onsite competitions there are usually sponsors covering travel expenses for finalists (at least up to some extend) - so if you manage to organize it this way, it should be really nice.
And regarding reasons for better motivation - well-organized onsite competition is a way to spend time nice, to meet new people etc., there are lots of small pros on this side. Like, what sounds better - “I did CodeChef contest with tourist! And 5 thousand other guys…” or “I was at SnackDown, and I saw tourist himself there”? In countries like Russia top contestants are active part of community, so it’s not a big deal meeting/talking to tourist or Petr etc. even when you are not so strong.
Yeah, it probably was an awareness issue, but don’t you think that the awareness issue is the major roadblock for CP in India? I don’t blame education system at all, but want to convey that the very idea to improve the lower bound of competitive programming would be to create awareness. Maybe holding quaterly contests with prizes, recognition can do the trick. If education system doesn’t include CP, then we have to attract people to CP. No one’s gonna wake up by himself and start doing coding.
Yes, I agree with those points. Interaction is bound to have a good effect. Yes, sponsered ones should be feasible for codechef as well. Lets see, I think they can do something in this field.
. It may not be the best/most-efficient step for helping to 5 and 6 stars to be 7 stars.