A multinational swarm of computer wiz kids has descended upon its natural Canadian habitat – Waterloo, Ont. – for a clash of programming titans that begins Monday. The 315 competitors, representing 81 countries, are here for the 22nd annual International Olympiad in Informatics, which is being hosted for the first time in Canada.
This is not a spectator sport. The high-school-aged competitors will be seated at computers and when the clock starts, they will open an envelope containing four complex problems and start reading. Over the next five hours they will be glued to their monitors, designing computer programs capable of solving each of the problems, in the most efficient and accurate way possible.
“You could be given 100,000 numbers and you have to find the smallest one, but the catch is that the numbers keep changing,” said Jacob Plachta, an 18-year-old Toronto resident and member of the Canadian team. “If you simply tried to sweep through all the numbers each time [they changed], then your program would be too slow, because you only get one second for your program to run.”
On Tuesday, competitors will enjoy a field trip to Canada’s Wonderland. Then on Wednesday, they’ll be back in front of computer screens, designing programs for the second round of competition.
“In a way, it can be more interesting than math, because when you’re dealing with a computer, more things are possible,” said Mr. Plachta, who started programming basic maze games in Grade 5.
As the host team, Canada has been allowed to enter eight competitors, and with two returning members who scored near the top of the 2009 Olympiad in Bulgaria, they’ll be gunning for the gold medals awarded to the top 12 finishers. They face stiff competition from programming powerhouses, including China, Russia and Poland.
“I think everyone here thinks a similar way,” said Anna Piekarska, 19, a member of the Polish team. Math is an important skill in informatics, and Ms. Piekarska said it was nice to be surrounded by people who find math problems as enticing as she does.
One of the challenges for organizers is translating the problems into the dozens of languages represented in the competition. Each night before the two rounds of competition, the students and their team leaders will be quarantined separately, as the leaders translate the problems into their native tongue.
One of the challenges for competitors will be finding a date for Friday’s award banquet: All but 12 of the competitors are male. The Libyan team is the only female-dominated roster, with three girls in its lineup.
Tryouts for the Canadian team began in February when approximately 2,500 students participated in the Canadian Computing Competition. The 20 top performers were invited to a training camp in May, where the final eight team members were selected.
Those final eight, Grade 11’s and 12’s from Windsor, Ont., Port Coquitlam, B.C., and the Greater Toronto Area, spent last week preparing with their coaches.
“At the end of the day, training is about simply doing problems,” said John-Paul Pretti, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo and one of the coaches.
That is where the human participation ends, as the final say goes to a computer. A “grader computer,” as organizers call it, programmed to test the accuracy of the students’ submissions in a variety of scenarios.
“What matters the most is that it’s correct and works in all circumstances,” said Mr. Pretti. “After the competition is done and no longer live, computer programs will calculate each student’s total final score.”
