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14-Year-Old Wins International Programming Contest
marcog123 writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics was held earlier this week in Bulgaria. The IOI is a programming competition for high school learners up to 20 years of age that has a focus on problem solving and algorithms. It was won by 14-year-old Henadzi Karatkevich of Belarus (PDF, list of gold medalists), beating the world's top high school programmers, including 18- and 19-year-olds, to become the youngest winner in the IOI's 21-year history. Competition is really tough, with some countries taking months off school to concentrate only on IOI training. Henadzi first entered the IOI in 2006 when he was only 11 years old and won silver (missing gold by only six points). He won gold in 2007 and 2008. He has the opportunity to enter for the next three years; that is, unless he follows the path of Terence Tao, who won IMO gold at 12 and then went to university the following year. If he continues his current streak, he will easily surpass the current record of six IOI medals by South Africa's Bruce Merry."
Don't know how this is news. Anyone who concentrates on something hard enough will get it eventually, age doesn't matter. It seems silly to people in America maybe because kids now are too interested in jacking their brains into Xbox Live and their iPhones. I used to be heavy into that stuff as well... but then I got a social life and found out early on that life is way too short to waste your life completely on it. Do it for fun or for your job, but if you eat, live and breathe it, it will destroy you. Oh and having sex became priority number one...