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)."

Informatics is a weird word

[D4C5CE]

The French coined "informatique" (which the Germans adopted with a k for last letter) so as not to have to say anything like "Computer Science" (they also called their TV "System Essentially Contrary to American Method" for a reason, you see ;-)).

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:

What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence:
the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Alan J. Perlis

Then again, the use of "Olympiad" (where -cs would finally have been indicated instead) is probably just as questionable.

learn2english!

[tetromino]

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.

Re:FAIL! Olympiad = time between Olympic Games!

[rumith]

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...

Re:Informatics is a weird word

[mindcorrosive]

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.

As far as "Olympiad" is concerned, the national student competitions between pupils in different schools have been traditionally called "Olympiads". It's a heritage of the olden days of Socialist government, paralleling the Olympic games. We have those in various other fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.