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)."
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.
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.
Re:FAIL! Olympiad = time between Olympic Games! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Informatics is a weird word (Score:2, Informative)
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.