It seems that I'm too busy browsing through the contest standings to notice that one quite major country in the world is missing: the UK. In fact, the people in UK doing CP and active now doesn't even exceed 200 people. Why is that? Why is CP popular in the US but not in the UK?
In history, there aren't any LGMs in the UK. There are only two reds in history, in fact. Why is that? Can anyone in the UK talk about how people treat CP in ur school/country?
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Because the UK is just smaller?
Italy population is comparable to UK population, and there are less than $$$100$$$ active users.
Poland has smaller population than uk
I would say the exception is Poland, not the UK.
I would say poland strong
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It's the same thing in most of Western Europe.
Can confirm, CP is dead in Ireland.
In fact, not only the UK is like this, there is also my country — Syria — and most of the Arab countries, even Egypt. There is currently only one GM from Syria , one GM from Egypt and so on.. You can measure this against the rest of the countries in the world.
It's actually not the same: there are 104 active users in the UK to 830 in Syria and 3864 in Egypt
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Competitive Programming simply isn't as popular in the UK. Only a small proportion of students have heard of CP. And most students discover it too late, and they have less time for it since the school day lasts 8 hours.
In Britain, the "ideal student" is well-rounded, rather than highly focused on one activity. Thus most ambitious students distribute their free time among many different activities — from playing the violin to participating in Model United Nations. Those who do want to learn CP are often discouraged after realising that one hour a week is not enough.
Most countries that have strong programmers have special schools, training camps or other resources available. In comparison, UK students who learn CP do so on their own using online resources, and rarely have friends that share the same interest.
*rarely have friends
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CP seems to get very little attention in the UK. The British informatics olympiad website is rather outdated and could make it unappealing for schools to host the competition (which is also not helped by the lack of a grader for round 1, so teachers have to mark it themselves). And we have no official training programme beyond the weekend-long selection camp.
I also think lots of people don't set the country or set it to their country of origin, which doesn't bode well for UK, since UK has a lot of immigrants. Ex, if you look at this, you will see that Oxford (A UK university) has 3 active reds, 1 of whom is LGM. Cambridge also has one. There are actually probably more who just don't set the university as well.
I've always thought that it's extremely odd how unknown competitive programming is in the UK — it's a gap in the market to me given how popular competitive math is here in comparison. Whenever I meet people from my school who used to be interested in math olympiads, I'll tell them about competitive programming and they always express how appealing it sounds.
I've seen a comment mentioning UK universities as a counter argument. But if you look at ICPC results, you'll likely be misled; pretty much all of those programmers are not home students (meaning they are international), so this is no indication that there's a strong CP culture here. It's the opposite.
I agree with erekle that most competitive programmers from the UK (myself included) discover it too late. I wish for there to be more awareness about competitive programming in the UK, given how many would be interested in it.
US population / UK population = 332 / 67 = 5
US active participants / UK active participants = 612 / 93 = 6.6
US total participants / UK total participants = 2889 / 459 = 6.3