* On the contrary, programming competitions (as with programming in general) are extremely g-loaded. They’re basically really difficult IQ tests for programmers. Anyone with a bachelor-equivalent computer science background (probably less) would be able to grasp the problems and the classes they belong to, but you need to be a high IQ savant in order to win these competitions, as they are 100% about abstract problem solving.
I was pondering this question not so long ago when I was looking at past results for the Google Code Jam programming competition and noticing the over representation from Slavic countries, especially relative to population sizes and quality of higher education. I wonder if it might be a case of higher IQ variance, whereby Slavic countries tend to have more individuals in the super-smart and super-dumb range and therefore have a larger pool of geniuses to choose from, similar to how men and women are distributed on the bell curve. This could also partially explain bydlo culture and high violent crime rates relative to other white countries. Of course, I have nothing solid to back this hypothesis.
* Russians are incredible at lateral thinking. Machine logic, especially objective-based programming, requires certain degrees of lateral thinking.
* The late Soviet educational system was better, on average, than Western educational systems. The top US universities and Oxbridge are the best in the world, and in the late Soviet period Moscow State University would have probably lagged behind several of them on objective measures like the number of hard science Nobels per decade, but everywhere outside of the extreme top range the Soviet system was better. Early childhood education, secondary education, the average college, the above-average-but-not-top-tier college – all of that was obviously better, and by a lot.
The quality of Western education declined for lefty ideological reasons in the 1960s. Rote memorization was deemphasized, standards dropped, there was a move from hard subjects to soft ones. The USSR missed that trend. Post-Soviet states must have cought up to that trend starting in the 1990s, but I don’t know to what extent. Maybe these results are trying to tell me that the destruction of the 1990s wasn’t as complete as I thought, at least in this sphere.
There are other possibilities. It’s important to consider where the best brains in a society are going. There are so many choices – business, the arts, the sciences, engineering, scholarship, laying about doing nothing. Maybe in post-Communist societies a larger percentage of the big brains are going into programming?
* It isn’t just programming skill.
Russia was always ahead in a very wide spectrum of production and design technologies during the Cold War since the 1960s (including optoelectronics, crystal growth techniques and semiconductor heterostructures (see the Nobel Prize for Alferov), spatial light modulators, photonics, neural nets used for automatic piloting of spacecraft, titanium alloys, metal matrix composites, reusable large heavy-lift vehicles like “Energia” that was capable of manned missions to Mars, large coated Beryllium mirrors (one of the hardest materials to machine properly, due to surface cracks) for SDI-type large battlestations, controlled thermonuclear fusion, aerohydrodynamics and designs of vehicles like ground effect vehicles (the “Caspian Sea Monster”), new devices like “plasma” stealth coating, Pamir-3U energy cores), that had more long-term physical potential than microelectronics. Most American leads (e.g., computer-controlled adaptive optics, the Nike-X series of ABM systems with the “Sprint” missile and later, some (not other) versions of SDI, certain kinds of strategic radar) were based on the traditional American leads: microelectronics, surface coatings (like for the “Sprint” missile, possibly the fastest accelerating object in the Earth’s atmosphere), chemical fertilizers and propellants, complex systems engineering (as used in Apollo and Azorian, or in Bell Labs) and some kinds of general purpose machine tools. But mostly, virtually all American “leads” over Soviets were based on a single lead that was microelectronics production based on traditional wafer fabrication and surface chemistry: but Soviets were ahead in a wider range of devices, and were also ahead in techniques related to nanolithography (which is currently taking off), eventually closing that gap. American submarines were “quieter” (at least before the mid 1980s) mostly because Americans imported high-end Japanese milling machines for producing the propellers (to minimize mechanical noise). Soviets were ahead in high-end computing and especially coherent optical computers, which had less physical limitations than microelectronics had (but less miniaturization).
Soviet neural nets and associated mathematics were so advanced that they were literally decades ahead (see the book by Galushkin and the comments on it by Lofti Zadeh (founder of fuzzy logic) and others). American RAM coating used in stealth aircraft was originally derived from Ufimtsev’s method of calculating radar cross section, in a Soviet journal that was read by the CIA — see the account of this by Alfred Price (in “War in the Fourth Dimension”).
