USACO Olympiad
This is targetted for high schoolers and I met couple of Junior boys who are preparing for it today. If the boys are preparing for this curriculum in high school, wonder what they will be doing when they graduate. I cannot clear some parts of this curriculum even after 10 years of experience. Take a look. “Advanced Dynamic Programming, Prefix Sum, Segment Tree, Segment Tree with Lazy Propagation, Range Minimum Query (RMQ), Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA), Heavy-Light Decomposition, Square Root Decomposition, Heap with Update, Shortest Path, Minimum Spaning Tree, Euler Tour, Belman Ford, Tarjan's Strongly Connected Component (SCC), All Pairs Shortest Path, Matrix Exponentiation, Max Flow, Max Flow Min Cut, Konig Theorem, Rabin Karp, Knuth Morris Pratt (KMP), Suffix Array, Min Max, A*, Hill Climbing “
There is this guy called Benjamin Qi in codeforces who became legendary grandmaster (top tier) in his 10th standard. His rating at that time was > 3000. Guess the number of Indians who crossed 2600. Less than 10. This is how high school kids who did USACO looks
Took me more than 3 years to clear the training, pretty hard stuff, some require crazy performance tuning as the code is run on old machine.
This is nothing new actually. Competitive programming (CP) has been around for quite some time. I did CP since high school as well and have a bunch of friends who are IOI medalists & ACM ICPC world finalists. Not all competitive programmers become strong engineers/scientists however.
It’s hard to believe that competitive programmers are not strong engineers.
I did USACO contests in high school too. But also these people are like the top .1% in the world and you dont need so much fancy algo skills to be successfull in soft engineering.