Greeting Fellow Students, Staffs, and Lecturers
Apologize for the inconvenience due to the topic I am talking about would be closer to Computer Science, with moderate relevance to Mathematics and Statistics Programme. As you some of you know, for a while I have been competed in a kind of competitive programming event with unusual format in Codeabbey. Normally, in a competitive programming event such as the well known Google Codejam or the most popular Top Coder, participant would be given a limited time, usually 4 to 30 hours to solve several problems. From my experience here I tell you, this kind of competitions is hard to survive for Indonesian participants due to quite large gap of skills with foreign participant. I could provide the data, but will talk more regarding this in separate topic, if chance permits. Although once the competition end we as the participant still gain access to the problems and can still solve it. But it lost appeals easily since there are no reason to compete.
Due to this factor, several similar but different competitive programming format site begun to grew such as CodeAbbey, CodeForces, & Hackerrank, all established in 2012. They adopt different approaches to competitive programming format. But the similarity between them was they felt there is a need for limitless time for programming contest. However the differences between is also significant relating to how they weight the importance of this new concept. Hackerrank stereotype is a kind to cat mixed in bag, they put equal importance to both tight (time) and untight (time) contest. Codeforces, put significant effort to promote the usual contest with given a side importance to untight programming contest, they also offers kind of programmer social media. Different with the rest, CodeAbbey is the only one which put first importance to indefinite time programming contest to sharpen its participant skills. And this is reflected in how well the quality of their problems are arranged. They are the only one which I think is suitable to Indonesian peoples due to how well the problems are arranged such that it can measure actual skills fairly from basic to advance. Recently, our country ranking there is getting past Malaysia and even Israel in term of top scorer and lowest score in page 1 country rank. But still a bit far from Russia, US, UK, India, Japan, Singapore & China.
In fact problems in Codeabbey had been heavily discussed in Algorithm & Programming course in Mathematics Programme for two years. It also has been set as part of passing mechanism in later half of the course. The good news is, it will also be adopt in Algorithm & Programmer course in Computer science Programme for this semester. I also adopt certain numbers of completion as a prerequisite for several courses including Mobile Computing, Machine Learning Introductory, and Computer Architecture. Since these are requiring students to master certain degree of problem solving skill. For those whose happens to read this message and those whom already completed part of problems, did you feel it if your skills had been more tuned?. And to those who have yet to participate, please do give it a try to improve our country rank.
Muhammad Eka Suryana
Top 100 of CodeAbbey World Rank
Python & Java Gold Badge in Hackerrank
(Edited by MCL Administrator - original submission Friday, 21 September 2018, 8:45 PM)