Top programmer, 15, says talent same as sports aptitude
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Fifteen-year-old Neal Wu compares his computing talents to those of an athlete who can make winning touchdowns or score three-point hoops.
The only difference is that Wu enters competitions that allow him to create problem-solving methods and solutions for software development.
Wu, a Baton Rouge Magnet High School sophomore, placed second in an elite international competition of top high school-age software developers. Wu is the son of Mei Wu and Guorong Zhang.
The TopCoder High School global programming tournament took place in Connecticut in March and attracted 49 competitors from countries including the United States, China, Hungary, Poland, Romania, India, Mexico and Canada.
“You have to come up with methods to solve and solve quickly,” he said of his strategy.
“You have to come up with something clever, and that’s often important when you’re developing software. You usually have to find an efficient way of doing something.”
Wu earned $10,000 in prizes. During the competition, Wu had to solve three major problems involving computer programming. He solved all of the problems, though not as fast as the first-place winner. Part of his job was to find errors in other competitors’ computer programs and then find ways to solve the problems.
He also used a problem solving technique called “dynamic programming,” he said. “The basic idea of dynamic programming is to divide a problem into sub-problems, solve those problems, and then combine them together to solve the whole problem,” he said.
To put Wu’s win in perspective, TopCoder is considered the world’s largest software development community with more than 140,000 developers representing more than 200 countries.
TopCoder competitions are a primary focus in recruitment and hiring by top software development organizations including Google, ESPN, AOL, and even the U.S. National Security Agency, said Michael Schultz, president of Message Infusion, a public relations company.
Wu is excited about his future prospects in the job market. “It means that the computer industry is becoming more and more popular and growing rapidly, and they need some of the best people to do some of the harder jobs,” he said. “These competitions can show who is at the top.
“I feel like a regular high school student, but I guess I’m just better at programming than most people. It’s like an athlete who is a regular kid but is better at a certain sport.”
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