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14-Year-Old Wins International Programming Contest

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-working-on-a-beard dept.

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."

5 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Ah, great for us! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps he can fix slashdot

  2. That's curious by rumith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you look at the history of IOI winners (especially multiple winners, found at the Wikipedia entry, most of them originate from former Soviet republics and Soviet-aligned countries (i.e. Eastern Europe). I currently fail to provide an adequate explanation for this phenomenon: yes, there are plenty of talented programmers in Russia, but as far as I can tell, software industry per se is virtually non-existent there (at least compared to the US).

    1. Re:That's curious by chrisG23 · · Score: 5, Interesting
      This comment is half heresy because I was born and raised in the USA by Romanian parents. What I understand is during the Communist era of the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc countries, education was greatly elevated. The thinking behind this was that the Communist countries would use the brainpower of their people to propel themselves above the degenerate West. (Its ironic that at least here in the US the opposite philosophy was followed, we make our people too dumb to notice there is a fundamental problem with our education system and then import talent from other countries when needed.)

      Teachers in these countries were expected to be subject matter experts at all levels of instruction, and not just yahoos with lesson plans and an inability to see multiple solutions to a problem (I am speaking from my personal experience with the American public education system here. The fundamental difference comes down to teaching how to find methods to approach and solve different problems vs teaching a method to solve a single problem and requiring little or no understanding of the underlying concepts at play. At least so I am told. It does explain some things.

      The descendants of people in this system (I hear at least in Romania the schools are not what they used to be) are reaping the benefits, and over here in the USA kids are worried about being safe in school, getting shot, or being ostracized by their peers for somehow being smart or trying hard (and being punished by the system for the same).

      My 2 cents.

    2. Re:That's curious by azgard · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually (as a citizen of Czech Republic, former Eastern block state), I think there were several factors:

      1. Communist regime actively encouraged smart people to work in mathematics, technology and natural science fields. When I was in 6th grade, I went to several hobby groups (organized by the local communist youth organization) - one dealing with natural sciences and second dealing with electronics. While such clubs exist today too, the participation is not so much enforced on the parents.

      2. Today, you can buy almost anything in the shop. Back then, you couldn't. It was natural for people to know how to repair various things, and experimentation with electronics (and later computers) was very common among young people.

      3. Life in communist regime was _extremely_ boring. Doing any technical hobby was a way to escape this boring reality.

      Having a technical hobby is much easier now, because you have specialized shops that will sell you anything you need (which weren't the case at all back then), but much less people actually do it (there is also so much of other stuff to do to enjoy life).

      By the way, I know Martin Mares (one of the frequent winners) personally from the high school - boy, he was and is smart! He could program in assembler like someone would write a letter, and talk to me about differential equations in the meantime. Still, I don't think IOI is so difficult as IOM, so the comparison with Terence Tao doesn't really hold water that well.

  3. Umm.. it's a high-school contest by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who do you expect to win it, a 30 year old? Most High-School students are between 13 and 18 years of age.

    I don't see it as extroardinary news, that a 14-year-old one won an international contest among students around that age range.

    It would be far more interesting if a 14-year-old won an international contest whose participants included college students studying CS at an advanced level :)