from Hacker News

In the Olympics of Algorithms, a Russian Keeps Winning Gold

by khmel on 11/14/12, 8:08 PM with 53 comments

• by Sirupsen on 11/14/12, 10:10 PM

  Petr is no longer ranked #1 on popular competitive programming sites such as Topcoder [1] and Codesforce [2]. 18-year-old Gennady Korotkevich [3] from Belarus ranks better on both, and has also won the most medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics ever, he was awarded his first silver medal when he was 11.

  Nonetheless, Petr is a legend in this field.

  [1]: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank

  [2]: http://codeforces.com/ratings

  [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich

• by droz on 11/14/12, 8:50 PM

  Seems somewhat nonsensical to claim the man is the "best computer programmer in the world", (ignoring for a moment the notion that there is such a thing) since only a small percentage of computer programmers in the world even participate in these events and that the "best computer programmer in the world" couldn't care less about such competitions.

• by sakopov on 11/14/12, 10:02 PM

  I'm Russian and feeling liiiitle bit proud right about now. :) I'm his age and we're the last generation of soviet-era school graduates. Russian educational system is in one enormously epic crapper right now and people like this guy are going to be a real rarity in Russia.

• by damian2000 on 11/15/12, 1:06 AM

  Interesting that he shifted from Pascal to C# in 2005. Anyone know if these contests allow you to use any language you want?

• by khmel on 11/14/12, 8:11 PM

  there's high density of post-Soviet block people in TopCoder ranking - out of TOP10 7 are from Russia, Belarus and Poland. Other 3 - China, Japan, South Africa http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank

• by cosminro on 11/15/12, 10:26 AM

  Here's some more background around Petr http://www.quora.com/Petr-Mitrichev/What-it-is-like-to-meet-...

  And some discussion around Russia and China dominating in coding contests http://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-from-Eastern-Europe-and-C...

• by genuine on 11/15/12, 6:03 AM

  It's because it gets so cold there, so the two things to do are to drink or stay inside and code. ;)

  Much props to Russian developers!

• by dikshun on 11/15/12, 12:17 AM

  Khmel, did you and Petr graduate from the same university? Quite the alumni base they are building there.

• by SagelyGuru on 11/15/12, 8:57 AM

  It seems a great pity that Google puts so much talent to work on improving the search engine algorithms ´to deliver the most relevant result first´ and then ruins it all by putting some cheap schmuck´s site at the top, no matter how irrelevant, just because he paid them a few bucks.

• by ropz on 11/14/12, 9:00 PM

  Topcoder is such a great site that it can't even program a Captcha to let you in when you get it right :0>

• by Jabbles on 11/14/12, 9:27 PM

  "which he posts as videos online"

  Does anyone know of similar videos in English?