21st International Olympiad of Informatics Opens, In Bulgaria and Online 74
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)."
Great event for budding programmers (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Great way to get to MIT (Score:3, Interesting)
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 participat
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Yes.
I was in the Hong Kong team in IOI2003, and have participated in the Chinese national contests (Hong Kong is part of China, but can send independent teams due to "one country two systems"). Getting into the Chinese team is much, much, much harder than getting a medal in the IOI.
Two of Hong Kong's IOI gold medalist actually fared rather poorly in the NOI (the National OI of China), one got just a bronze in NOI2002 and another didn't even manage to get a mention in NOI2006. Of course, knowing them persona
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In China, they actually have agreements with top Chinese universities (eg. Tsinghua University, which is sometimes known as the "MIT of China") so that those who perform well in the National Olympiads would *automatically* have a place in University.
A number of participants in the Chinese Olympiads compete not only out of interest but also as an alternative (or even as their primary strategy) for university admission. I heard the university qualification exams in China is really, really tough, so naturally
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Put your hand on a girls ass and the image of your hand stays for a bit.
It always does, if you do it hard enough.
It is almost certainly cultural (Score:2, Insightful)
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 p
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Re:Frist Post (Score:4, Funny)
physics and other olympiads get any mention here
Use the submit a story link [slashdot.org] and there is a good chance that your articles would get posted to the main page.
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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!"
Great accommodation too (Score:3, Interesting)
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Are you telling me, that the organizers themselves are the ones who failed?
Yes. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
It is incorrectly named "Olympiad" (the time between two Olympic Games) instead of "International Olympic Games of Informatics".
learn2english! (Score:5, Informative)
I quote Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 [thefreedictionary.com]:
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.
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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.
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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 furthe
Informatics is a weird word (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Informatics is a weird word (Score:4, Interesting)
Even in Japanese they call it 'Information Science' (Jyouhou Gakka).
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Then again, the use of "Olympiad" (where -cs would finally have been indicated instead) is probably just as questionable.
That one's easy: they want to avoid lawsuits for trademark infringement.
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True as it may be, the subject is called really "Informatics" in Bulgaria (I should know, it's my high school major, and I am Bulgarian coincidentally). It is not Computer Science as you understand it, because we didn't study much about e.g. networks, compilers, operating systems and such, but we concentrated really on the fundamentals and theory of programming and related mathematics - writing and testing algorithms, building and testing low-level code in e.g. Pascal or BASIC (on paper, too). Great starter for future programmers, I tell you that. If you haven't written your standard issue quicksort or a customized implementation of Newton's method in 10th grade for a homework assignment, then you wouldn't understand.
This is actually what most computer science curriculum covers in the US - the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of programming.
The online contest (Score:1)
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If you've actually seen the questions, the language does not usually matter.
It's a competition mainly on algorithms. No fancy language features are needed other than the most basic -- basic arithmetic, array manipulation, function calls, and standard I/O. There's usually no need to do even string manipulation. A solution on any popular language would look pretty much the same, and most solutions, even in the verbose Pascal, are within 300 lines of code, so syntactic sugar is not really that important.
Howeve
Testing architecture and design (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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I agree. I've been involved in these programming competitions, and have met people who basically just knew how to code and do well in these competitions and nothing more.
But when they had to work in the real world, they picked up those other "software development skills" effortlessly.
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> As the idea about competition in architecture... well, the ones who can't code :P should also have their competition, so why not? :P
Heh. I have awards from both IOI and ACM (gold medals, etc) and have significant industry experience, so I feel that I know what I am talking about :)
Most programmers apparently believe that the best way to make a scalable application is to (re)write it in assembler. The responses to my post seem to prove that point. Perhaps architecture/design competition is more necessar
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Rewriting in assembler would be a very strange strategy from someone who knew anything about algorithms. If I had two programmers, one of them I thought of as a good "designer" and the other I thought of as a good "algorithms programmer", I would trust the latter more to come up with a scalable solution. I would expect a generally bad solution - like rewriting in assembler - to be much more likely to come from someone who had no experience with algorithm competitions.
Writing scalable algorithms to deal wit
special olympiad (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Really difficult algoritmic programming (Score:1)
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 yo
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Sometimes coding brute force solutions don't work :) I've seen those problems before, those where you don't even have an idea how to brute force the sample test case.
And getting 10-30 per task isn't going to earn you a medal, last I checked. But then if I have free time during the 5-6 hour competition, I'd try that as a last resort.
-- IOI2003 participant :)
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There's an h in algorithm ;)
I don't quite understand the IOI's emphasis on rote memorization of algorithms ... how well do you think you would be able to do after a few years without reference materials?
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"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."
That's why this is one of the approach I like:
1. Implement quick-and-dirty code. You'd encounter good part of issues, both anticipated and unforesee
A great programming motivator (Score:1)