Computing

ICT Careers: Willy Wonka and the Google factory

In what must be a kind of Geek version of the Willy Wonka tale (as if the chocolate factory weren’t geeky enough), Google is offering 40 students and their parents a rare look behind the scenes at the company’s Sydney Googleplex.

ITWire, Mon July 27, 2009

Years (ok, more than twenty years) ago I entered an Australian computing Olympiad. It was the pre-trial run, to see if anyone from the tiny thousand-person shire high school would actually enter the true ACS Olympiad. Amazingly enough, someone did.

Since then I think the Australian Computing Society has run regional South Pacific trials in which Australia periodically appears. Other Olympiads also exist, but in general it's been fairly low-key. There has been a recent announcement of re-invigorating the secondary schools computer science outreach

Meanwhile, the Australian Computer Society and peak research agency National ICT Australia (NICTA) have announced a National ICT Prize for high school students, where years 10 to 12 students have a chance to win prizes from a total pool of $5,000, with top prize being an ICT internship inside NICTA's research laboratories.

“Offering school students the opportunity to contribute to dynamic, world-class ICT research projects is a powerful way to engage them with tertiary-level ICT study and participation in the digital economy,” said NICTA's education director, Tim Hesketh.

which makes me wonder: why are there no substantial tertiary programming contests in Australia?

My 2nd-year computer science Algorithmics lecturer Mike Houle, introduced me to the idea of individual programming competitions for hard problem solving - travelling salesperson and the like. I've seen similar things since, either for individuals or teams: typically it's a massive class assignment, in which the competitors hand in one final solution code which is tested, and run. The competition winner is the one with the best score. In Mike's case there was some feedback along the way with a trial data set, that students posted (on his door -- no real Internet then!) their current score.

I have found a different type of programming competition, which I am particularly interested in: the Matlab one where teams not only compete on the problem as stated, and publish their scores but they also publish their code thereby giving the opposition a chance to modify and resubmit the code before the competition closes. It has the feel (to me who has never seen one) of something like real code collaboration - subversion style. It also strikes me that the winner of such a competition need not be the best programmer, but that much of the "sponsors' benefit" will be achieved in scoping out the competitors while the competition proceeds.

This sort of competitive collaboration is one of the aspects that makes the MATLAB Contest "programming as a spectator sport".

Matlab 2002

So, is it possible for Australian Universities to have a code-collaborating competition like this? There would need to be some common need, and some common benefit (both the students and the sponsors) but it strikes me that with enough impetus, there are enough Comp. Sci., Soft. Eng and Elec. Eng students around who'd jump at the opportunity to hack away.