I find that the largest problem about this competition is that the people who can actually do this probably have no motivation to compete. We all have jobs, lives, and cool stuff to hack on in languages we actually like using.

That didn't stop me from competing when I was a student. I got into the finals. The training I did still helps me to identify and solve algorithmic challenges to this day.

I don't know if that's a good excuse because most of the competitors are students.

But yeah, programming competitions are not a high priority for US universities.

The scoring system is a bit unfair these days. Taiwan and Kiev solved 6 problems each, got the gold. Ural State solved 6 problems, got nothing.

What do you mean? That's what the tiebreaker is for. Problem writing is hard, especially if you're trying to distinguish between very close competitors.

The difference between those different entrants is a huge amount of time. The winning unis made correct entries earlier, and had less incorrect entries.

Compare it to a marathon where there are 9 finish lines. The more you cross, the better you did. Everyone who crossed the 6th line is ranked by when they crossed it - or how fast they ran. They probably also got much closer to the 7th line before the time ran out.

My school = honorable mention :-(

And this is completely unrelated, but is anyone else annoyed at the choice of languages. Only C++ and Java... sigh.

Well at least my school won North America.