Happy new year people!
New year has always been special in competitive programming community, especially in Codeforces. We see different kinds of magic every year in Codeforces, and we're so grateful for them; thank you MikeMirzayanov. But, what if we too could show people some magic?
I was talking to one of my friends the other day, about competitive programming resources, and he reminded me that MAXimal is one the greatest resources for studying algorithms and data structures, however, it's not available to everyone since it's in Russian only. Of course, one could use google translate and try to understand it, but we all know even if it works, it's going to take a lot of time. So I had an idea! What if we translate all the articles in e-maxx to English? Of course, this isn't a job for one person, so I coudln't do it alone. And then, it crossed my mind... Crowd-sourcing! Everyone can contribute! Not only Russian speakers, but also others can use google translate for help. We're going to translate e-max together!
So I started today and spent the whole January 1st writing a website that's going to be a competitive programming resource available to everyone, in English (and later on, maybe even in other languages!). I called it AlgoBase.
You can register at AlgoBase and submit the articles you've translated. For now, we're only going to translate the "algo" section of e-maxx. The deadline to submit your translated articles is February 14th. Avoid altering the materials and translate them as they are. After the deadline, the best translated version of each article (chosen by votes) are going to be published (with the name of their translator) on AlgoBase.
To make it more interesting, two published articles (on AlgoBase) are going to be chosen randomly and their translators (more specifically, their usernames) are going to be the heroes of my CodeForces round (my next round after articles are published). And also, two other published articles are going to be chosen randomly and their translators will get AlgoBase T-Shirts. The selection is between articles, so the more articles you translate, the more chance you'll have at winning ;)
Happy translating!
TODO: Soon there will be a list of submitted translations available so that we know what articles have been translated and etc. Also it's possible that we add more prizes if more people participate!
UPD: Apparently there's a project named e-maxx-eng with the goal of translating e-maxx. But there are a lot of algorithms on e-maxx and only some in this project. But still, some pages are already translated. Therefore, the pages that are translated and present in e-maxx-eng are NOT ACCEPTED.
For the info: https://github.com/e-maxx-eng/e-maxx-eng/
Interesting... This is not complete tho
Seems like a nice endeavour to me :)
What about topics absent on e-maxx? Are they accepted aswell?
Not at this stage, but after February 14th, why not?
Stop it.
The goal is just to have access to e-maxx in English. I've tried to read e-maxx articles using google translate but I gave up every time. You missed my point :|
I don't know russian, but looking over translations — yandex, google and e-maxx-eng. I find changes in ideology but content stays same, but deep meaning seems lost, it's not catchable from algos like bfs,dfs but in articulation points and advanced stuff.
What I feel that e-maxx-eng must be reviewed again, thanks for the contributors, there efforts revived up the article for the non-russian community .
Why not just contribute to the github project? The effort seems to be ongoing for the past 3 years, latest commit was about a month ago.
And how many pages have been translated during 3 years?
So far about 45% of the pages have been translated (but some of the translated articles also need improvements).
I'm currently one of the maintainer of the e-maxx-eng project (but only since Nov). First of, I haven't talked with the other maintainers Nickolas (main maintainer for the last years) and RodionGork (creater of the project). So I don't know their opinions so far.
I really like dalex's point. I doubt that starting a completely new project is a good idea. Translating all ~146 articles of e-maxx is a colossal job. And I doubt that a month of crowd-source will cover every article (even though being the hero in a legendary PrinceOfPersia round is quite persuasive). Nickolas and Rodion made similar attempts in the last year as part of the Hacktoberfest event (with shirts for every contributor). A lot of articles have been translated during these events, but obviously not enough. Of course we don't want to claim the monopoly on translating e-maxx. But my fear is that this just ends with another half-finished attempt.
I'm not sure how much time you already invested into your project (and I also currently cannot see the website), but maybe we can work together. I'm sure Nickolas and Rodion also will be happy to collaborate. I saw, that you already changed your target to translate only articles that aren't covered already by us. But maybe we can afterwards host the articles together, or something similar. I informed both of them already, and maybe we can talk via PM later and figure some solution out.
I heartily agree with Jakube, though of course I dare not say that PrinceOfPersia's idea is wrong or bad.
The main trouble with these initiatives is that they require some administrative attention in a course of very long time, and the work do not move fast. There were some attempts to create translations of Emaxx earlier (including my previous one), however all of them regretfully die soon because the person who decides to drive them loses patience, have no enough time etc.
So the idea of "e-maxx-eng" at github was to attempt a more "community-driven" way of work. So the losing of contact with some specific person (e.g. me) will not stop the work. Luckily Nickolas and then Jakube offered their help. And probably in future they will delegate administrative rights to other people etc...
The other point is that current solution is using free github and appengine infrastructure, so there is no danger that anything will go offline because of someone forgetting to pay money for hosting or name. Though of course the project lacks top-level domain name for this reason. Nevertheless it is well indexed by search engines and enjoys small but constant audience of visitors... Which is ok for site costing 0 bucks per year.
P.S. About last 3 years — the current "authomated" version of e-maxx-eng was only started in October 2016. So the site's age is less than year and 3 months.
Yandex translate is awesome for Russian-English translation, even for technical stuff. I used to learn a few things and had no problems.
The site doesn't seem to be working. Is the project still active?
No, the website has been offline since months.
If you want to help translating e-maxx articles, we are always looking for help at the e-maxx-eng project. You can see here, which articles still need a translation, and which one already have one.
Is someone planning to translate dynamic graph connectivity problem using sqrt decomposition?