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posted by takyon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the we're-number-one dept.

According to the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the competition involves six problems taken in sets of three during 4.5 hour sessions (held across two days)—no calculators. Each team member attempts the problems, and team totals are based on the number of points each individual scores. The US earned 185 to take the gold while China earned runner-up honors with 181. It's the US' fifth victory overall. China has the most competition wins with 19 all-time, including winning four of the last five competitions heading into the 2015 edition.

Link to article with its image of a sample problem from the competition. It's rare to hear positive news about math education in the United States.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:13PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:13PM (#211978)

    Sounds like noise. If you can score 0 to 42 points per person, and team score is just a sum of individual scores, and the difference between 1st and 2nd place teams is a whopping 4, then the sequence of "winners" sounds like statistical noise. The difference between 1st and 2nd is less than 10% on one individual, like if one dude on a team has a cold or doesn't sleep well then you just dropped from first team to last team. To some extent, its an extension of participation trophy culture.

    I'm not sure what it means to have a team result for solitaire competition. We could have a soylent news official solitaire card game "team"... Also not clear what it means to have a "national" team when it looks a lot more like asian male immigrants than "america". There's nothing wrong with who they are, I'm just saying they're not representing Detroit or American women very well. So its not a "national" team and its also not a national "team" but the statistical fluctuation gods smiled on them and they "won" by a rounding error. OK then.

    WRT the problem in the linked article, looks like a typical project euler problem. Those can be fun. Good way to learn a language, along with some new math concepts. Both at the same time is usually a bit rough.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:39PM

    by Francis (5544) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:39PM (#211989)

    That's high end competition in basically any field. The difference in times for something like the 100m sprint is measured in small fractions of a second. With times coming in at under 10 seconds, a bad nights sleep can take a person from 1st to last just based upon decreased reaction time.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:15PM (#212000)

    Less true here than in a 100m dash. There are quantized breakpoints along the 0-42 range, and they are usually arranged around certian leaps of understanding.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:50PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:50PM (#212016)

      There are quantized breakpoints along the 0-42 range, and they are usually arranged around certian leaps of understanding.

      OK will accept that.

      However the problem is ordering. So the difference between 1st and 2nd place is less than one measurement unit per "teammate". That doesn't inspire confidence in the statistics with respect to who "won".

      Maybe bad SN car analogy is imagine 10 more or less similar subcompact commuter cars, and you want the highest MPG. Unfortunately due to individual production quirks, climate, payload, and local path, the variation in individual cars of a certain model is larger than the variation between models. So the "best" car today is a mere roll of the dice, they're all basically equal, or more precisely, using existing testing tools we can't tell them apart better than rolling dice.

      A more technical car analogy would be to gather some normal and oversize pistons and ask people to arrange them by size using only a wooden ruler. Given that the difference in diameter might only be a tiny fraction of an inch, whatever order they put the pistons in will be essentially random. Using a large micrometer you could put the pistons in size order, but you're not using that measurement tool. And there certainly does exist an order, even if you don't have the technology to measure it.

      Maybe the TLDR would be I sniff that the difference in order is smaller than a realistic standard deviation in the data, smaller than the smallest unit of measure. Its likely that incorrect conclusions will be drawn on the assumption that the ordered list means anything.

      • (Score: 1) by TestablePredictions on Tuesday July 21 2015, @11:39PM

        by TestablePredictions (3249) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @11:39PM (#212128)

        Not trying to be smart-aleck here, but in the spirit of the olympiad, I started wondering if there was a clever low-tech way to sort those pistons...

        Lay two pistons on sides just far enough apart that ruler can lay across them. Line up a third piston onto the center of the ruler and allow to roll in the downhill direction. Repeat this pairwise diameter comparison as many times as necessary until the size order for pistons is known.

        But maybe the ruler would sag in the middle enough so that using gravity as a differential amplifier doesn't actually work.

        • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:21AM

          by vux984 (5045) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:21AM (#212136)

          It might also be possible to at least partially sort them by taking sets of three arranged [ a ........................................... bc ] and lay the ruler across; if b is taller than c the ruler won't touch c. (If a >> b the ruler would still touch c, but that would be obvious to the naked eye too. And we're assuming a ~= b ~= c.

          One could use a hair or piece of paper to help determine if the ruler is resting on c or not. (Obviously only good for differntiating differences > the the width of a hair or sheet of paper.) But it should be enough to sort pistons that are only different by 100ths of an inch.

          Eventually you'd identify one of the largest pistons, and repeat using that for a to refine it further.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 22 2015, @11:30AM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 22 2015, @11:30AM (#212261)

          Speaking of the middle of the ruler, I think overbore pistons are heavier, so fulcrum the center of the ruler and do some balance games?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by tibman on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:53PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:53PM (#212018)

    That is most professional competitions. Look at the olympics and how close the races are. If you sneeze during a run you will lose. Also, anyone who immigrates to the US is now an "American". You don't pull the no true scottsman thing here. They are either an American or they aren't. You can't excluded an American because they at one point were not American or they descended from non-Native Americans. What you look like, what you believe in, and where you came from does not change the fact that you are an "American".

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:08PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:08PM (#212057)

      Ahhh! I knew there wasn't anything to it.