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21st International Olympiad of Informatics Opens, In Bulgaria and Online
Kostadin Vodenicharov writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics is considered one of the most prestigious programming contests in the world. Currently the 21st IOI is being held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (which was the country that also hosted the 1st IOI), from 8th to 15th August. High school students from all over the world have gathered to put their programming skills to the test. Everyone else who wishes to participate can do it in the online contest which will run in parallel with the real one and will present the same tasks to be solved. The competition itself is going to take place on Monday 10th August and Wednesday 12th August from 9:00 to 14:00 EEST (UTC+3)."
I remember when my team won the Math Olympiad back in high school. The light hearted competition was what really stands out as the prime motivator for me. Without this kind of competition, we geeks would have just been white wedgied wallflowers with wack Hypercolor t-shirts.
The kids taking part in this IOI are going to take home something memorable. And hopefully the American teams can learn a little more about the rest of the world.
physics and other olympiads get any mention here
Use the submit a story link and there is a good chance that your articles would get posted to the main page.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
It's also a great way to get a scholarship to a great university, like MIT (no flaming to other schools, insert your favorite school here that gives need-based scholarships to international students)
From my experience, from the people that I know from Eastern Europe, only those that went to such international Olympiads (math/informatics) managed to get admission to MIT..
In many eastern-european countries, it's more difficult to qualify for this event than the actual tournament..
Kudos to those who participate and to their teachers..
In my time there was no TopCoder, UVA, etc... it wasn't easy to prepare for these.. But now I'm sure it's even more challenging, given the amount of material available..
They also put us contestants up in the Novotel Plovdiv, supposedly the flashiest hotel in Plovdiv.
Are you telling me, that the organizers themselves are the ones who failed?
Yes. From Wikipedia:
It is incorrectly named "Olympiad" (the time between two Olympic Games) instead of "International Olympic Games of Informatics".
Is there a prize for that too? Nerds should do well. Maybe combine both activities. "Oh oh oh, recursive closures, you do it too me baaaadly!"
Table-ized A.I.
To assimilate this word back into English which already has a common(-sense) name for the field would probably have made the founding father of Computer Science wonder if he was right about the first part of his famous statement:
Then again, the use of "Olympiad" (where -cs would finally have been indicated instead) is probably just as questionable.
I quote Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006:
Olympiad
Noun
1. a staging of the modern Olympic Games
2. an international contest in chess or other games
The word "olympiad" is extremely common in the names of major national and international contests in fields such as mathematics, science, computer science, etc.
Africans and African American individuals have made great strides in science in technology. It's well known that botanist George Washington Carver invented over 200 things out of peanuts. It's less known that African Americans are also behind such technologies as pace makers and traffic signals.
However, that there are outstanding individuals of any race is not surprising. What is surprising, as you have pointed out, is the dearth of African Americans winning these competitions. However, if you look at the problem statistically, you'll find that they are winning in proportion to their representation as participants. Which is to say not at all.
But why is that? The simple answer is to ascribe lower intelligence to Africans, but that is a cop-out. The real answer is multifaceted and has roots both in external discrimination as well as negative factors in the African American community which hold back achievement. White racism is also at fault for creating mass media caricatures like Steve Urkel and Carlton Banks as black kids succeeding in society due to their overwhelming non-blackness.
The problem you describe is insidious and sad. But it isn't because Africans and African Americans are less intelligent than you or me. It's due to much more complex socio-cultural reasons that have their roots in racism.
So did anyone manage do participate in the online contest ? It only shows a blank page to me. Also, what do you think about only allowing 3 languages ? Isn't choosing the best tool available for a task the most important skill for a good programmer ?
I'm not sure about Bulgarian, but in Russian "Olympiad" (or, rather, Olimpiada) is the word for such a contest, be it school-, city- or worldwide. I perfectly understand that it conflicts the original meaning of the word, but hey, languages do evolve, and sometimes they do due to common misunderstandings or lack of comprehension...
Software Development consists of several relatively independent skills:
- programming (knowing how to use the tools)
- algorithms
- architecture and design
- knowledge of processes (development methodologies, etc)
- enabling teamwork (allowing many developers to work together)
etc.
The IOI competition is for high-school students and tests mainly the 'algorithms' aspect.
The ACM competition is for college students and tests mainly the programming aspect. (strange, one would think that the aims of those two would be reversed)
There does not seem to be a big competition for testing the architecture and design abilities, although arguably they are even more important (unless you count the Real World competition). Part of the difficulty perhaps is that it is tricky to come up with an objective measurement. An approach that I have been using is the following:
- give a task and provide plenty of time
- at 50% of the time change the requirements of the task slightly
- at 90% of the time change the requirements significantly
If proper design has been used, then making appropriate modifications would be easy and the task would be accomplished in time. This closely mirrors the situations in reality.
I look forward to the Special Informatics Olympiad. Especially for all those WTFers who have no natural ability to code, and so have to scratch out a living in eCommerce. It would be good to see them honored.
Yeah, it's the same in Bulgarian. By the way, in English, it can also refer to
the contest itself and the nitpickers above are simply wrong.
No good deed goes unpunished...
What exactly needs citing? Your point is stupid as all the things he said are well known facts. Except the average IQ thing, that is. But even particular statement may have some truth to it, as no one has been able to do research on the matter without drawing racist flame from every imaginable party. It's sad really, that an entire research field is denied to researchers simply due to it being a touchy subject.
As a contestent in the IOI in Egypt last year I can tell you that the problems you're solving are really, really hard. I estimate that more than 50% of all professional (working) programmers wouldn't be able to solve even one of them. This is becouse this is algoritmic performance programming and not generic functional one.
To make up the problems they usually take one or more generic problems (like maximum flow), then they add an additional twist that makes the implementation non-trivial. So first of all you have to had solved similar problems and know the algorithm. If you don't you might go for the brute force solution that usually gives you 10-30/100 points. However, the brute force solution usually takes a long time to construct, therefore it's all about planning.
You have 6 hours and 3 problems. If you think you can do a problem the "real" way, you better be damn sure, unless you want to waste time on thinking and writing useless code. Usually the problems are constructed so that you are tricked to belive they are much more trivial than they actually are when you analyze them. That got me several times. Spending ~3 hours to construct an algorithm that completed the "testing" test case but failed most/all test cases that gave points.
One guy in our team had a great strategy. He ignored in depth analyzation and started writing a brute forcer as soon as he understood the problem. This way he was guaranteed 10-30 points per problem, and usually when writing a brute forcer, you get to understand the problem so well that you can make improvements or even write the correct solution for it.
I was amazed that a 13 year old earned a gold medal the last year. That means he's probably better on algoritmic programming than 99% of the readers of slashdot.
I wish all contestants this year the best of luck.
It could also be that US students are more likely to be driven by a "profit motive" (prize money) rather than prestige alone due to our culture. There's also the question of how much prestige such awards have in a given country or culture. US employers seem less enamored by "academic" successes compared to something they see as a more practical test or metric. In Asia, accolades and awards seem to go further. There are too many unknowns to make blanket statements about Americans being "no good".
Table-ized A.I.
I tried out for the french IOI team this year(didn't make it of course, or else I wouldn't be looking at this I think), and really enjoyed myself just for the workshop and the tryouts. The other guys at the workshop were there obviously to find potential members, but firstly just to teach us programming skills. Not things like how to make a guess game or whatnot, but to learn "useful" skills, namely algorithms, complexity, and problem solving. They also have a site with programming tutorials that don't go too indepth in terms of language, but have very indepth algorithm explanations(which is good considering that most "my first programming book"s don't even bother with algos). I can't really vouch for other IOI teams' preparedness and teaching abilities(USACO has a training site though I don't know how well made it is), I can say that that experience really motivated me for the coming years.