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Friday, July 5, 2013

While many of us will be kicking back on the couch over the school holidays, a team of young Australians will be spending next week competing in the IOI, an international programming Olympiad, against high school students from over eighty countries. Over the course of two intense competition days, teams will attempt to solve six questions that would leave many seasoned programmers scratching their heads.
To give you a feel for how tough these questions are... try this one.
Imagine you are in a canoe and are travelling along an unfamiliar, foggy river covered in bridges. How could you write an artificial intelligence (AI) that can map out the bridges by sending the canoe on straight lines between points on opposite riverbanks and counting how many bridges it passes beneath?
Oh, and to score full marks for this problem, your AI must be flexible enough to map any conceivable set of bridges, strategic enough to make no more journeys than necessary, and fast enough to run on a typical laptop in under a second - even if there are hundreds of thousands of bridges.
For high school students that are interested in developing their problem solving skills, you can try out problems of all difficulties at the Australian team’s training site. As the first stage of the 2014 IOI, Maths and computing teachers can also sign up their class to compete in the Australian Informatics Olympiad - which will be held in schools on Thursday 5 September 2013.
The IOI will be held at the University of Queensland from 6-13 July 2013. You can follow the Australian team on their blog. Posted by Christopher Chen, Google Software Engineer and two-time IOI gold medallist