The International Olympiad in Informatics
The International Olympiad in Informatics (I.O.I.) is an international computer programming competition held
every year and attended by more than sixty countries. The location of the event changes from year to year and was
held in Wisconsin, USA in August 2003 and in Athens, Greece in Sept
2004. Poland
hosted the IOI in 2005. Ireland has participated in
the IOI each year since 1994 but the competition
began back in 1989. Participants must be below 20 years of age in
July and are still in secondary school. This includes
Leaving Cert students.
The IOI runs over the course of a week and includes two 'competition days'. On these days, each competitor is
assigned a computer and is given five hours to solve three computer
programming tasks. Either 'C', 'C++' or 'Pascal' may
be used as a programming language to solve the tasks.
The IOI is an individual competition, in that each competitor competes independently but countries are allowed to
send teams of up to four people, each of whom will receive their own individual scores.
Choosing the Irish I.O.I. Team
An All Ireland programming contest takes place in Dublin City
University (DCU) on a Saturday in December or January each year. The top
students are awarded a trophy and medals. They form a panel with
the other top young programmers and the 4-member Irish IOI team is
chosen in early Summer.
What kind of Computer Programming Tasks have to be solved?
See Programming
task examples.
How do I find out more?
For beginners to programming, there are a number of links (on the left hand
side of this webpage) to tutorials on programming.
For those who can write code, there are a number of links (on the
left hand side of this webpage) to some programming problems to
test your abilities.
Join the MAILING LIST to get an email
when competition tasks are released. This is a low-traffic mailing list
and you will not get more than three emails PER YEAR.
Countries hosting Previous IOI Competitions
- 1994 : Sweden
- 1995 : The Netherlands
- 1996 : Hungary
- 1997 : Capetown, South Africe
- 1998 : Setubal, Portugal
- 1999 : Antalya, Turkey
- 2000 : Beijing, China
- 2001 : Finland
- 2002 : Korea
- 2003 : Wisconsin, USA
- 2004 : Athens, Greece
- 2005 : Nowy Sacz, Poland
- 2006 : Merida, Mexico
- 2007 : Zagreb, Croatia
- 2008 : Cairo, Egypt
- Future hosts: Bulgaria, Canada, Thailand, Italy
Previous Irish IOI Medal Winners:
- Brian Jones: Bronze '94
- Robert Beattie: Bronze '98, '97, '96, '95
- Eoin Curran: Silver '97, Bronze '96, '95
- Colin Watson: Bronze '96
- Stephen Dolan: Silver '06, Bronze '07
- Ciarán Ó Conaire: Bronze '99
- Martin Orr: Gold '03 Bronze '02 Silver '04 '05
