Posted on 12/02/2005 1:49:21 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
They came from around the world, young men with handles like SnapDragon and Bladerunner attacking computing problems so complex that even experienced coders could only stare at the screen in bewilderment. Only one mastered the final algorithm problem: Eryk Kopczynski, a.k.a. Eryx, a reticent Warsaw University student who wears his long hair in a ponytail and says his life's ambition is to "discover some interesting notion."
Kopczynski's triumph in this year's TopCoder Open, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, was no fluke. He was following in the footsteps of a slew of computing geniuses to emerge from the monolithic Soviet style buildings of Warsaw U. "Poles like to compete," says Warsaw U computer science student Marek Cygan, winner of this year's Google Code Jam. No kidding. Warsaw University is ranked No. 1 in the world in top coder events, ahead of the likes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Just like India's best tech schools, Warsaw U has confounded a scarcity of resources to identify and nurture bright students.
As the race for top talent heats up globally, it turns out that Central Europe houses one of the planet's richest creative pools. U.S. movie director Brian De Palma recently wrapped up filming in Sofia of The Black Dahlia, a version of the James Ellroy noir novel starring Hilary Swank and Scarlett Johansson. The producers painstakingly recreated the streets of 1940s Los Angeles on a Sofia movie set. Why Bulgaria? Super low costs is one reason. But there's more: "The crew is probably the best I've seen anywhere," says David Varod, head of Bulgarian operations for Los Angeles-based Nu Image/Millenium Films, which co-financed the picture.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
fyi
Let me know when they produce one single software product that's worth money. To the best of my knowledge, all they've come up with so far is a wide assortment of viruses, worms, and trojan horses.
I've worked with coding geniuses in the past. The problem is, they don't want to document their code, and it takes other people an eternity to figure out how it works so that it can be maintained. I prefer a mediocrity who can write code that other people can understand over a genius any day.
bump
Weren't the Poles the first to break the Enigma code?
Could be, but I thought it was broken by Alan Turing.
Anyway, that was more than 60 years ago.
Reverse Polish Notation is a way of expressing arithmetic expressions that avoids the use of brackets to define priorities for evaluation of operators. In ordinary notation, one might write
(3 + 5) * (7 - 2)
and the brackets tell us that we have to add 3 to 5, then subtract 2 from 7, and multiply the two results together. In RPN, the numbers and operators are listed one after another, and an operator always acts on the most recent numbers in the list. The numbers can be thought of as forming a stack, like a pile of plates. The most recent number goes on the top of the stack. An operator takes the appropriate number of arguments from the top of the stack and replaces them by the result of the operation.
In this notation the above expression would be
3 5 + 7 2 - *
Reading from left to right, this is interpreted as follows:
Polish Notation was devised by the Polish philosopher and mathematician Jan Lucasiewicz (1878-1956) for use in symbolic logic. In his notation, the operators preceded their arguments, so that the expression above would be written as
* + 3 5 - 7 2
The 'reversed' form has however been found more convenient from a computational point of view.
This file was last revised by Anthony Stone (ajs1@cam.ac.uk) on 3 June 1997.
If memory serves, the Brits disregarded the Pols' calculations and kept working at Bletchley Park.
Turing also gave us the Apple logo....
Software aside, the genius of what we pejoratively refer to as ''old Europe'' will eat our economic lunch.
Software aside, the genius of what we pejoratively refer to as ''old Europe'' will eat our economic lunch.
Ya think? What about China and India. China is now one of our largest creditors.
1929 the Poles knew about the commercial Enigma and hired three mathematicians for code breaking. The most famous was Marjan Rejewski.
It is not quite clear how the Poles got all details about the military Enigma. Different stories are told. They collected a lot of German messages and have been supported by the French secrete service with copies of Enigma training handbooks got by espionage. With all this information they have been able to rebuild an Enigma until 1933. The correct rotor wiring was found by help of mathematical equations (Gleichung).
The Poles also found out, that the double coded message key at the beginning of each message sometimes leads to identical letters, called "females" (.e.g ABCABC enciphers to PSTPWA, letter 1 and 3 is supposed to be the same letter). This occurred on average every 25 messages.
They developed different devices and methods to find the message keys:
Zygalski, one of the mathematicians, used perforated paper sheets and arranged them on an illuminated table to reveal possible starting states.
The "Bomba" was a mechanical device simulating the 26*26*26 positions of the 3 Enigma rotors. 6 "Bomba's" were necessary for the 6 possible wheel orders (3 wheels until 1939).
Over the years, the Germans did modifications on the messages and the machine itself. They added 2 additional wheels, used more Sockets, the twice given encoded message key was given up in 1940, the wheel order was changed daily (starting from 1937, not only every 3 months). After these changes the Poles didn't have enough money and resources to built 60 new Bombas which became necessary to break the modified Enigma.
In 1939 the Polish mathematicians moved to France, at least they gave all their knowledge and material to the British.
Umm..no such thing as the above exists.
I know what you are saying only to well. Over a number of years coding (sometimes at a C-level) using mostly Unix based Informix Database Development tools, I spent many a weekend writing detailed user manuals, and buring huge amounts of comments into my code for anyone to follow up on. Often quite sophisticated sub routines call back functions etc., required detailed explanations in the source code.
I would venture to say I probably spent as much time sometimes working around the clock on and off for weeks on end creating large documents, memorandum, notes, as well as full user manuals as I had in actually generating the code.
Of course, I lived at work. And did not get paid for it. Seldom do we find this new generation of programmers willing to do as I just described. Admitably, many simply don't know how to add good documentation. That is why companies are beholding to hire documentors. Sadly they cannot replace the programmer that writes well defined in code comment fields that truely lead follow up programmers in what their code represents. It all goes along with the territory.
Thanks for correcting me, Milhous.
Grim, but funny!
Actually true. Turing was still a big deal among computer hobbyists in the 60s/70s. Today he's largely forgotten. Early interviews with Jobs and Woz reference the logo to Turing, but then they backed off that story in later years.
Better let the newbies in on the joke. Alan Turing committed suicide by injecting an apple with cyanide, then having a bite. He was a sodomite in legal trouble looking for a way to spare his mother's feelings.
The other part of that is he was one of the weird genuises the Brits collected as code breakers in WWII. These included math guys, but also crossword puzzle guys, amateur cryptographers, langauge specialists and other assorted oddballs.
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