The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual international informatics competition for individual contestants from various invited countries, accompanied by social and cultural programs. The IOI is one of the five international science Olympiads, and is one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world. The number of participating countries has continuously increased, with more than 900 participants and 85 countries attending this year for the IOI2018 in Tsukuba, Japan.
The main objectives to be accomplished by the IOI include:
• To discover, encourage, bring together, challenge, and give recognition to young people who are exceptionally talented in the field of informatics;
• To foster friendly international relationships among computer scientists and informatics educators;
• To bring the discipline of informatics to the attention of young people;
• To promote the organization of informatics competitions for students at schools for secondary education;
• To encourage countries to organize a future IOI in their country.
Each participating country selects a team of up to four contestants to represent their nation, along with one team leader and one deputy leader. Students compete individually and try to maximize their score by solving a set of informatics problems during two competition days. On each of the days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours.
The competition tasks are of algorithmic nature; however, the contestants have to show such basic IT skills as problem analysis, design of algorithms and data structures, programming and testing.
The students who attend the IOI are some of the brightest young computer scientists in the world.