AquarEnglish

Today The Google Story reached Chapter 16.
Just read a lot of news, when trying to subscribe some blogs on ‘Code’ and ‘Programming’.
Found this on digg.com :

Programmers from China and Russia have dominated an international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components.
Whether the outcome of this competition is another sign that math and science education in the U.S. needs improvement may spur debate. But of the 70 finalist in it, 20 were from China, 10 from Russia and only two from the U.S.

The whole article as follow:

About 4,200 people participated in the U.S. National Security Agency-supported challenge. The NSA has been sponsoring the program for a number of years because of its interest in hiring people with advanced skills.
Participants in the contest, which was open to anyone — from student to professional — and finished with 120 competitors from around the world, went through a process of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas.

China’s showing in the finals was also helped by the sheer volume of its numbers, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers were finalists. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128, among others.
Of the total number of contestants, 93% were male, and 84% were aged between 18 and 24.

Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, said the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education.
“We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there,” Hughes said. He said the U.S. needs to make earlier inroads in middle schools and high school math and science education.
That’s a point Hughes is hardly alone on. President Barack Obama, as well as many of the major tech leaders including Bill Gates, have called for similar action.

Of the participants in the contest, more than 57% had bachelor’s degrees, most in computer science, and of that 20% had earned a masters degree, and 6% a PhD.

But the winner of the algorithm competition was an 18-year-old student from China, Bin Jin, who went by the handle “crazyb0y”. Chinese programmers have a history of doing very well in this contest.
Mike Lydon, TopCoder’s CTO, said Jin’s future in computer science is assured. “This gentleman can do whatever he wants,” he said.
The participants are tested in design, development, architecture, among others, but one of the most popular is the algorithm coding contest.

To give some sense of difficulty, Lydon provided a description of a problem that the contestants were asked to solve:
“With the rise of services such as Facebook and MySpace, the analysis and understanding of such networks is a particularly active area of current computer science research. At an abstract level, these networks consist of nodes (people), connected by links (friendship).
“In this problem, competitors were given the description of two such networks, but with the names of all the nodes removed from each. The networks were each scrambled up before given to the competitors. The task was to determine if the two networks could possibly be from the same group of people.
“The competitors were to unscramble and label the two networks so that if Alice was connected to Bob in one of the two networks, then Alice was also connected to Bob in the other network. This problem is known as the network isomorphism problem, and solving it for large networks is a major unsolved problem in the realm of theoretical computer science.”

Lydon said the overall problem is unsolved for larger networks, and what’s considered a correct answer for this problem would not be considered large enough for the solution in this case to be groundbreaking.
Two people solved the problem.

I think this exposure such things that Chinese student true master mathematics better or (to tell the truth) easier. In a Chinese mind, number system is much easier than that in any other language. I got this feeling a long time ago, and emphasized it while reading Mind Performance Hacks, which introduced many methods of how to calculate in mind or something like that:
Its Chapter 4 titles Math, which including these hacks:

• Hack 35. Put Down That Calculator
• Hack 36. Make Friends with Numbers
• Hack 37. Test for Divisibility
• Hack 38. Calculate Mental Checksums
• Hack 39. Turn Your Hands into an Abacus
• Hack 40. Count to a Million on Your Fingers
• Hack 41. Estimate Orders of Magnitude
• Hack 42. Estimate Square Roots
• Hack 43. Calculate Any Weekday

Reading this chapter I found that number is a big problem for many foreigners (or maybe not? But I found these things in my Chinese mind exist by nature…).
But then I found a contradiction:

Why Chinese student hadn’t found companies like Microsoft? Or something more close to us, like Google? Facebook? Twitter? These websites all based on algorithms which are not too complex. So, are we only focusing on complex ones?
NO, EITHER.

I believe what caused this is a lack of creativity. That’s not to say we Chinese don’t have new ideas, but we don’t CATCH IT. Everyone can be creative. But when we used to come up with an idea, what we usually got is discouragement. So, we wouldn’t be devoted to archiving it. And in the course of time, we wouldn’t even thinking about new ideas any more.

And, we Chinese always feel that things NOW are ENOUGH, which leads to such a result that we don’t want to improve anything exists. Meanwhile, I find many foreigners want to improve every concepts of things in their lives EVEN VERY SMALL CONCEPTS.

Two culture, two attitude. It’s not the question which is better, which is worse. But I will try to change my mind into a creative one.

And reading The Google Story makes me believe that Technology is ALWAYS on the TOP of this information society.

I’m proud of hearing this news, but something under this should also be noticed.

I’ve learned many algorithms. but while pronouncing names like Dijkstra, KMP, Bellman Ford, or Floyd, I always feel something in heart uncomfortable. And, I felt if we have a better sense of number but not using it properly, it’s such a waste of mental resources.

And I always feel sorry when seeing classmates who give up studying when so young.

I love Chinese(but not The Party).

Like the Death Knight in Blizzard’s RTS game WarCraft 3 often asks:

I will spill it for programming and code.
Bless myself a brighter future.