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Re: Contest
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From:
Peter Scott
Date:
September 19, 2000 16:45
Subject:
Re: Contest
Message ID:
4.3.2.7.2.20000919162754.00aa52d0@psdt.com
At 04:18 PM 9/19/00 -0700, Betsy Waliszewski wrote:
>Thanks for finding out this information, Adam--this is really a cool story!
>This may appear in the next success story.
You'd best have a word with Nat before reproducing this as is; AFAIR he
followed up on this some time after the fact and discovered one small
discrepancy; that Perl was not permitted to begin with. It wasn't banned
as a result of this entry, it was already banned. IMHO, this does not
detract from the point at all though.
>Betsy
>
>At 07:10 PM 9/19/00 -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> >On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 03:42:35PM -0700, Betsy Waliszewski wrote:
> >> The president of the company said that at
> >> a computer programming contest at some major university (MIT?) 4 or 5
> years
> >> ago, one contestant used Perl and blew away the competition. Afterward,
> >> Perl was banned from the competition because the judges decided it was
> >> tantamount to cheating.
> >
> >One of the guys in the office says this used to be posted on TPI's
> >www.perl.org. The institution was UCLA, and the year was 1997.
> >
> >Here's a memory of that preserved at http://chicago.pm.org/perlstory.html :
> >
> > From an article that used to be posted at www.perl.org:
> >
> >
> > Perl "Too Good"
> >
> > This is a true story. Names have not been changed.
> >
> > UCLA's Computer Science Undergraduate Association regularly
> > hosts its programming competition. Contestants are given
> > six complex problems and have three hours to write programs
> > to solve as many of the problems as possible. In 1997,
> > the rules stated that any programming language could be
> > used so long as you solved the problem, so then-undergraduate
> > Keith Chiem entered and used Perl.
> >
> > Keith did not merely win, he conquered. He solved five
> > of the six problems in the three hours allotted. The
> > second-place two-person team solved only three problems.
> > They, needless to say, were not using Perl.
> >
> > But if you're a UCLA undergraduate contemplating entering
> > the contest and using Perl, don't bother. After Keith's
> > conquest, Perl was banned from the contest.
> >
> > You've got to admire a language that is banned because
> > it makes problems too easy to solve.
> >
> > These days, Keith is a sysadmin at Yahoo! Inc., and is
> > wondering what to do with the copy of Visual C++ that was
> > his prize.
> >
> >Z.
> >
> >
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
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