> That's a big debate! For a lot of people, I would, though, yes. There are serious economists who posit that universities are mostly about signalling, rather than actually learning much. I don't think I agree with that entirely, and believe it depends a lot on what's studied. It also depends on the opportunity costs, which may not be that high for many people that age.
Fair enough. For myself, it was what lead me to my career. I found a large number exams followed a similar format to this very coding competition. Many times on the job I have thought back on exam questions for inspiration for the problems I was solving. In that sense, I most definitely do not classify my education as "dicking around".
It brings be to my original point; when video games were being developed, these admitted benefits were certainly not obvious at the time. We simply wanted to render things faster, and at higher resolutions. Now other applications of the same technology is ubiquitous in many regards.
As a final tangential point, I don't think the code competition is wasteful because it does not have any immediate intrinsic value. See exams example above, and really, the discussion here. Also, perhaps this was his so called "downtime". Many people would argue that not all facets of our life should be strictly geared towards productivity. He may already run a business or hold a day job (maybe his blog gives clues otherwise, I don't know).
There are plenty of things that aren't "productive", but strike me as still being more creative/interesting/useful than churning out the same answer as everyone else to a made-up problem. Making your own programming language or OS is not 'productive', but a great learning experience, creative, and lots of fun. And who knows, maybe someone will get some use out of it. I once made a fairly simple programming language, and it did end up seeing some niche adoption and use in industry, which was cool.
Fair enough. For myself, it was what lead me to my career. I found a large number exams followed a similar format to this very coding competition. Many times on the job I have thought back on exam questions for inspiration for the problems I was solving. In that sense, I most definitely do not classify my education as "dicking around".
It brings be to my original point; when video games were being developed, these admitted benefits were certainly not obvious at the time. We simply wanted to render things faster, and at higher resolutions. Now other applications of the same technology is ubiquitous in many regards.
As a final tangential point, I don't think the code competition is wasteful because it does not have any immediate intrinsic value. See exams example above, and really, the discussion here. Also, perhaps this was his so called "downtime". Many people would argue that not all facets of our life should be strictly geared towards productivity. He may already run a business or hold a day job (maybe his blog gives clues otherwise, I don't know).