International Olympiad in Informatics

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The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual informatics competition for secondary school students. The first IOI was held in 1989.

The contest consists of two days computer programming, solving problems of an algorithmic nature. Students compete on an individual basis, with up to four students competing from each participating country (with around 81 countries in 2004). Students are selected through national computing contests. For example, in Britain, students compete in the BIO for a place in the national team.

Structure of the competition

On each of the two competition days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works on his/her own, with only a computer and no other help allowed, specifically no communication with other contestants, books etc. Usually to solve a task the contestant has to write a computer program (in C, C++ or Pascal) and submit it before the five hour competition time ends. Later on, the program is graded by being run with secret test data, consisting of multiple (typically 10 or 20) test cases. The contestant is awarded points for each test case that his program solves correctly, and within the given time and memory limit. In some cases, the contestant's program has to interact with a secret computer library, which allows problems where the input is not fixed, but depends on the program's actions - for example in game problems. Another new type of problems has known inputs which are publicly available already during the five hours of the contest. For these, the contestants have to submit the according output file instead of a program, and it is up to them whether they obtain the output files by writing a program (possibly exploiting special characteristics of the input), or by hand, or by a combination of these means.

The scores from the two competition days and all problems are summed up separately for each contestant. At the awarding ceremony, contestants are awarded medals depending on their relative total score. The top 50% of the contestants (i.e. two per country, on average) are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of the contestants get a gold medal).

The competition room at the IOI 2006

Country Ranking

Unlike other science olympiads the IOI regulations specifically prohibit ranking by countries. Although several countries apply their own algorithms for country ranking there is therefore no standard.

List of IOI websites and locations

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See also

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