Recently I have read a news article at ACM’s website about the ICPC, which reminded me why I usually hate the media. How facts are casually distorted in order to make the truth “sexier”, sometimes even when it is not needed to.
The ICPC is a programming contest hosted by ACM. In it, students from all over the world get together to try and solve a large number of very hard programming problems in 5 hours. Each team has 3 students and one computer, so the contest involves not just the ability to read a problem, figure out which algorithm will solve it, and implement that algorithm correctly in a short time, but also how to best manage the single computer among the three students (you have to figure out and write down most of your code in paper before sitting down to program to save time). The participants are the best teams of their respective local competitions, young people with a great knack for maths and programming. The contest itself and the associated events were really fun.
However, obviously this was not enough for whoever wrote the article. They had to say things like that “the participants did the work of a traffic controller”, or that “the contest challenges participants to solve real world problems”. Really? Maybe the contest has changed a lot in the last 5 years, but the problems where all mathematical problems (longest path, geometric problems, search, constraint satisfaction, etc) with some “stories” thrown into the mix to test the players reading comprehension. *Sigh*
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On the other news, this week will be dedicated to writing my second journal paper, to complete the publication requirements for my PhD at the university of Tokyo. Allegedly I managed to get enough data for the publication with last week’s experiments, now comes the inglorious tasks of transforming all of that in an interesting and engaging document which won’t be criticized too heavily by the all mighty anonymous reviewers. I only have one week until the deadline of 31st, and I have a lot of other stuff to do in the same period, so I’m getting a bit worried that I won’t be able to make it. But if I don’t make it in time, I can still submit it for another, non-Special Issue Journal, a few weeks later – with the negative side that the lack of a fixed, externally imposed deadline would reduce my motivation.
(why am I posting in my blog instead of working? I’m trying to amp myself into writing mode by sitting down and writing here instead of reading a dozen different news and getting anxious – like the news I just blogged about above :-P).