IOI Report from Turkey

by Don Piele
Director, USACO
<piele@cs.uwp.edu>

The eleventh International Olympiads of Informatics (IOI) is now history. USA team members Daniel Wright, Ben Mathews, Percy Liang, and David Cheng faced the most difficult set of problems ever presented at an IOI. Fortunately, each member of the team managed to score well enough to receive a medal. A total of 257 students from 65 countries competed for 22 gold, 42 silver, and 64 bronze medals. Out of 600 points possible the median score was 135, rather low by previous IOI standards. Our youngest team members, David and Percy, who still have a year of eligibility, received bronze medals. Our retiring seniors, Ben and Daniel, who are going back to their freshman years at Cal Tech and Stanford, respectively, received silver medals. The top score of 480 points went to Hong Chen from China, for which he received the gold first-place trophy. Second place was shared by Mathijs Vogelzang of the Netherlands and Roman Pastoukhov of the Russian Federation. We were fortunate to have had Mathijs join us at our training camp last summer, so watching him receive the first gold medal ever for the Netherlands was a special treat.

Members of the team, Team Leader Rob Kolstad, Deputy Team Leader Brian Dean, and I flew to Istanbul and on to Antalya, Turkey's principal holiday destination. As soon as we left the airport, we were met by our student guide, who escorted us by bus to Sirene City Resort, an impressive five-star vacation retreat on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean.

The opening ceremony was held at the beautiful Talya Hotel in downtown Antalya. Professor Doctor Namik Kemal Pak, Director of Tübitak, relayed a message sent by the President of Turkey, Süleyman Demirel. Professor Göktürk Uçoluk followed with a brief journey through the history of computer science, ending with a string and ball demonstration of a constant time algorithm for finding the shortest path between two nodes.

Students and team leaders were housed in separate quarters so there would be no contact between the team leaders and the students once the problem selection process had begun. The general assembly began the question-selection process at 9:00 p.m. The process took longer than expected, and translations from English into each native language began in the wee hours of the next day. Some countries were still translating when the sun came up the next morning, making for a long and tiring night.

Up early on Monday, the students were led into a huge convention room that was partitioned off and filled with 300 networked computers. They would spend the next five hours trying to solve three tough problems by writing programs in Turbo Pascal or Turbo C/C++. The team leaders were in a separate location and never saw the students in action. The IOI competition has never been a spectator sport. Once the clock began, many team leaders headed off to their rooms or the pool for some well-deserved rest. In the afternoon, a workshop on "Future Competition Environments" was held. Rob Kolstad, our Team Leader, reported on the recommendations from a meeting of the New Environments Committee held in Enschede, Holland, in July. The recommendation to switch in the year 2001 to free Pascal and to C/C++ compilers (like DJGPP) that eliminate the 640K memory restrictions of DOS was overwhelmingly favored by the participants.

While we were discussing new environments, the Scientific Committee from Turkey was busy overseeing the automatic grading system as it worked its magic, examining the outputs from ten test cases run against each of the three problems. After a few hours, the grading was done and a report was generated for each contestant. These were handed over to the team leaders, who were then free to examine the programs one at a time with each participant. This process eliminated the painfully long grading process used in the past, where each contestant waited in line to have his/her programs tested. The automated grading process used in Turkey will undoubtedly become the standard for future IOIs.

Tuesday was spent relaxing and visiting the many sights of the area.

The second round of competition, on Wednesday, was a repeat of the first round. Again, several delegation leaders were up all night making their translations. After the competition ended, everyone headed for some R&R beside the pools or on the sandy beach.

On Thursday, the cut-off scores for the medals were quickly decided. A discussion followed regarding another recommendation from the New Environ-ments Committe to create an IOI Scientific Committee (ISC) that would assist each country's Scientific Committee in the formulation and review of problems and test data. It was explained that as the competition advanced in complexity, we should try to provide a level of continuity from competition to competition, so that each country need not start from ground zero. As it was explained by Rob, "It is far better to have cooperation between countries and help raise the level of all IOIs than to have a competition for the dubious title of 'Best IOI.' In this way the last IOI will always be the 'Best IOI,' since it will be constantly improving." The IOI Scientific Committee would provide another level of review, to ensure that the competition problems and test data are consistently of high quality.

Another recommendation was to create an IOI software team (IST). It would be responsible for the creation, maintenance, and distribution of evaluation software. Both recommendations were approved by the General Assembly.

The closing ceremonies were held at the Dedeman Hotel in Antalya on Friday. The Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey helped distribute the gold medals. Finally, the orange and white IOI flag was handed over by Göktürk Uçoluk of Turkey to Zide Du of China. Zide then invited everyone to come to the 12th IOI in Beijing, China, September 23—30, 2000.

The 11th IOI was another fantastic experience for everyone. The entire Turkish organizing committee deserves our most sincere congratulations for a truly impressive last IOI of the millennium.

To see the questions and the results of this year's IOI, go to <www.ioi99.org.tr>.

To see the photographs, go to <www.usaco.org> and follow the links.

Excerpts from Letters from the Competitors

From Daniel Wright:

I was on the US team to the IOI, and I'd like to say thanks to USENIX for making it possible. The Olympiad was really wonderful. In addition to the Computer Science we learnt, we became friends with people we would otherwise never have met — truly amazing people.

From David Cheng:

I just returned from a great week in Antalya, Turkey. The entire trip was remarkable: the hospitality, the excursions, the facilities. I even liked some of the difficult problems at the IOI. The experience taught me much — that I still need work debugging, that a Turkish lira is not worth much, that chance has some of the smartest people make mistakes, and that some foreign food cannot be completely trusted.

Thank you for your continued support.

From Percy Liang:

I just wanted to thank you for your support of the USA IOI Team. This was my first IOI, and it was quite an experience. I enjoyed my first glance at Roman ruins, and was amazed at the magnitude of the competition. I appreciate your help once again.