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The International Olympiad in Informatics is an annual competition in informatics (computer science). The goal of the competition is to promote the studying of informatics in secondary schools.
65 countries took part in the last IOI, the number of the participating countries increases every year. Each country sends a team of its best four students. Israel team is selected according to the results of the Israeli Olympiad in Computer Science.
The Israeli Olympiad has been held since 1996. Until now, the national Olympiad was consist of national stage and final round. The national stage is held in Tel Aviv and consists of questions in various difficulty levels. Those questions are solved using pen and paper. The contestants that achieved the best results get to the finals. The organizers of the competition hope to add additional levels to the competition, in order to encourage the participation.
After the team was selected, the training begin. The team leader organizes few meetings and gives questions and studding mateirial. Some countries put their teams in a training camp.
The International contest is held every year in a different country. The team of each participating country is consists of the four contestants, two team leaders, and sometimes additional members such as trainers and observers. Every team gets a local guide that takes care of team.
The duration of the competition is 8 days. Two of them are competition days, and the others are for ceremonies, excursions and social activities. The competition days consist of 5 competition hours and an evaluation that may continue until late night.
In the last day, at the closing ceremony, the contestant that got the highest score gets the trophy, the contestants (about 20) that got the highest score wins a gold medal, the contestants with slightly lower score get silver medals and those who got lower score than the silver medallists gets bronze medal. In the three years that Israel is taking part, it won three silver medals and three bronze medals. Part of the winners get prices in addition to the medals.
The structure of the competition in the recent years was consist of three questions each day, Every question gets scoring according to its difficulty level. The evaluation is being done automatically by the computer, which compares the output to the correct one.
The competition questions are solved in C or Pascal (each contestant can choose his language). The toughest part of the questions is algorithmic. In addition the program should stand in running time and memory space limitation.
There are no specific topics for the competition, but the topics that are likely to be in the competition and the training are focus on them are:
Recursion, dynamic programming, DFS, BFS, greedy algorithms and heuristics.
The contestants don't have to be familiar with those topics. The selected team will study those topics in their training. The questions usually don't demand any deep knowledge in Informatics or Mathematics.
Towards the national Olympiad, all the schools in Israel gets details about the competition and registration forms. The registration is done through the computer teachers or the principal
The national Olympiad and sending the national team to the international
Olympiad is done by the ministry of education together with IPA - the Information
Technology Association of Israel
