US universities slipping in programming contest
2005-04-11 Thomas Blythe
If the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest is any indication of a country’s technological intelligence, the United States is one country that needs to pull up its socks and put in more efforts.
The United States, once the dominator of the top slots in the contest, have now slipped to a new low of the 17th position, much behind Russia, China, Poland and even Romania. So far, this is the worst performance that America has put up in the 29-year history of this international contest.
This year’s edition of the contest, held at Shanghai in China, saw China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University walking away with the first prize. Moscow State University and St Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics, both from Russia, bagged the second and third prizes respectively. From North America, Canada’s University of Waterloo in Ontario assumed the fourth position.
David Patterson, from the University of California at Berkeley, said, “After World War II, the US was ahead, as all other countries were recovering from the war. We had a head start, and we were a leader by default. But now they have caught up with us.” He added that the United States was spending less on research even though world competition was rising.
According to Jim Foley, chairman, Computing Research Association, the education system of the United States is to blame for the latest results. “The educational system has done a demonstrably poor job of teaching technical, scientific and computing,” he said.
Meanwhile, Asian countries like China and India are fast making technological progress. While China is going all out to speed up its technological progress, India is fasting making a name in the software and programming fields. South Korea is dominating the broadband data transmission market.
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