That's pretty cool!

NO_ONE HASN'T MADE A COMMENT, AND I HAVE!!! THE WORLD IS OVER!!! j/k On a more serious note, I think that it's really cool that he won! I'm interested in what the questions on the "test" were and any more details...Also, I would like to know whether he got a job with Google and what a job with them would be...just programming?...Not that programming wouldn't be fun...I personally think it's a blast (even if I only program in C++ and TI-BASIC)...

-I love ellipses... :)

I slept in today. Yesterday, I was gone for the whole day, except when I first woke up (I checked ticalc then), but this news item wasn't there at that time... so, I was slow on this one. LOL

Yeah, I was wondering about that final test thing too. "Top 25 finalists will have an all expense paid trip to Google headquarters in Mt. View, CA – where the finals will be held on November 14, 2003. See website for official contest rules and registration."

Does that mean that they set them all down in front of computers and tell them to program something? LOL Sounds a lot like my AP Computer Science class, except I finish the program in 2-5 minutes, usually, while it takes everybody else the whole class period, or multiple days to complete the assignment. Sad, really.

And I wonder how they'd program something like page rank. It seems to me that if there are THAT many pages to compare, a google search would be longer than its usual <0.2 seconds.

Wow, this DOES look really cool... but I bet that there is a problem for most of us...... there, I found it.
"All individuals who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to register and compete in the Google Code Jam 2003."

Nobody likes the little people.

Aren't there laws against such discrimination!!! j/k

MWM

Maybe they just think that kids under 18 can't program. *sigh*

That's too bad...I'm 14, but can program decently...

There aren't. People under 18 aren't a constituency, because they don't have the vote, so anyone can do whatever they want with regard to rules about "minors", who actually have no legal status or rights. The bill of rights doesn't apply to "minors" and neither do laws protecting them from any discrimination. Legally, "minors" cannot sign contracts, own property, make any sort of decisions whatsoever, or act on matters without parental consent.

but how come in all the cartoons, the kid always signs all those papers when he/she/it becomes famous :p

> And I wonder how they'd program something like
> page rank. It seems to me that if there are
> THAT many pages to compare, a google search
> would be longer than its usual <0.2 seconds.

They precompute it and serve it from a massively
parallel network of commodity computers.
(Probably the PageRank is a long long int, or
something like that.)

long long int... that is BIG. Is that 2^64?

Depends on the platform, I beleive. On a 32-bit platform, long long is usually 64-bit so yes, 2^64. But AFAIK there are 64-bit platforms with 128-bit long longs, though I don't recall an example at the moment.

ps2 uses a 128 bit platform ^.^
HOW COME I DONT HAVE A 128 BIT CPU!!?!?!?

The PS2's CPU isn't 128-bit. The graphics processor is. The CPU is a custom-built 32-bit chip.

well then i want a 128 bit cpu!

Is there a short short? (256?) Or, would you just have to use char?

I've never seen a short short around. There is the ordinary 'short', but that one is generally 16-bit.

Yeah. I just figured if long long was implemented, that short short might also be. But char works, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

A character is a one-byte integer, so yes, that is what is used.

massivly paralell?
:)

Ah, I dunno. every site googlebot crawls is saved to their servers. so I think that as these pages are searched for (google only searches its cache and NOT EVERY URL IT KNOWS) their pagerank rises for other similar topics. Just my idea. I REALLY doubt that its all precomputed... pagerank changes all the time. There are useless threads all over the internet about this "phenomenon" and it's reflected in more threads like: who can find two words that produce the most search results, different people with the same prefs at different times in the same day can get a different # of results with the same search. And I'm not talking about that googleflux thing or whatever you call it every month when google reindexes.