Tuesday, August 12

The International Olympiad in Informatics is coming to the United States for the first time, and this prestigious programming competition for high school students will be at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside this week.

It's a coup for the school, which will host more than 500 students from 78 countries to compete in a weeklong meeting of the minds on its campus in Kenosha beginning Saturday. The olympiad -- which started in 1989 -- is typically held in exotic locations, including Beijing and Cape Town, South Africa. Next year it will be in Athens.

UW-Parkside's campus will be a dramatic change from past events, said Don, a math professor there who has coordinated the USA Computing Olympiad since it started 11 years ago and is this year's international olympiad chairman.

"It will be like going away to camp instead of going to an olympiad," he said. "You have the competition, but there is going to be a lot more because we can bring events to them instead of always busing them around everywhere."

And instead of all the students being bunkered in hotel rooms, the school's dorms and public spaces will let the young programmers mingle in a more open atmosphere, he said.

"It's community-building," he said. "We want them to interact a lot. When you get kids playing together, they get comfortable with each other, and we want them to have a good time here."

The olympiad's two-day competition will be the same as last year's event. Each day, students get five hours to work on three word problems they must solve by designing software. The problems also include data and input and output details so the students can write software in the C, C++ or Pascal programming languages to solve them.

The solutions are graded using a program that searches for bugs and determines which software is the fastest and most efficient for each challenge. The top half of the participating students win gold, silver and bronze medals, and the three highest scoring students get laptops, Piele said.

When the students aren't thinking about how to formulate the most clever algorithms, the International Olympiad in Informatics has some light diversions planned, including some time on a beach, a Frisbee golf tournament and a day trip to Chicago.

Most of the costs of running the event are covered by its sponsor, Microsoft, and about 50 volunteers from the school are helping, too. Organizers even managed to cover costs of the computers the students will use in the competition by reselling them.

Last year, everyone on the U.S. Olympiad team earned medals: one gold and three silver. Tiankai Liu of New Hampshire, who won a gold medal last year, and Alex Schwendner of Texas, who won a silver last year, are on the team again. Timothy Abbott of Virginia and Anders Kaseorg of North Carolina are new to the squad.

The four students were chosen from a group of more than a dozen programmers who were invited to the eight-day competition at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. They earned an invitation to the training camp by scoring high on five Internet programming competitions, and more than 400 students nationwide tried to make the team.

Despite the images its name might conjure up, the olympiad is not a spectator sport. There are no bright lights and no roaring crowds. The atmosphere is quiet, reserved and professional. There are even activities scheduled for the guests coming with the contestants, so they don't have to sit around while the programmers code.

"It's a very boring activity," Piele said. "It is like they went into a classroom to take a test."

He said the international competition is always strong, with China, Russia and central European countries performing consistently well. But he said the U.S. always does "fine."

"We will always bring home four medals," he said.