On the glorified team were tenth-graders Daria Grekova and Petr Losev from Moscow, as well as eleventh-graders Gimran Abdullin from Kazan and Ivan Piskarev from Moscow, both of whom were on the team last year. In order to make it on the team, students had to win the Russian national olympiad in computer science and prove themselves at the training camp.
The competition includes two rounds, each five hours long and including algorithmic problems worth 100 points. To win, the participants had to write programs to study patterns in hieroglyph sequences, plan artifact transportation across the Nile on two boats, and color a mosaic on the wall.
The Russian team was the only one to receive all four of the olympiad’s gold medals. Other winners in the contest represented China, the USA, and Israel.
“A gold medal at an international olympiad is a truly great achievement. Every year, only around 30 students become gold medalists. In Russia, we have an efficient system for talent hunting: we start working with school students already in their fifth and sixth years, including them in clubs, olympiad camps, and summer schools. Juniors can take part in contests for 6-th-8th-graders, and we invite the high achievers to our training camps. Next, winners and runners-up of the national contest can become candidates for the national team. They take part in several training camps, prove themselves at the Asian Pacific Olympiad, and then the coaching team chooses four best performers who will participate in IOI,” shared the team’s coach Andrey Stankevich, the Dean of ITMO’s Information Technologies and Programming Faculty.
Dmitry Gorbatovsky, who was recently admitted to ITMO's Information Securities and Programming Faculty, secured a bronze medal for the Belarusian team.
The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) has been held annually since 1989. This year, the 36th IOI was held in Alexandria, Egypt, on September 1-8. Repeating last year’s triumph, Russian students hauled four gold medals at the contest. Since the start of the contest, Russian teams have secured a total of 120 medals: 68 gold, 40 silver, and 12 bronze ones. In the general ranking of the contest, the country is on the second place, right behind China with 142 medals in total.
