Swiss Olympiad in Informatics

175 participants registered for the SOI 2004, out of which 63 finally sent in their results. Although this marks a slight decrease in participation, it was very encouraging to note the increase of female participants to 7.9 per cent.

As usual, the SOI attracted students from all over Switzerland. 20 cantons and of course all the four national languages were represented.

All participants of the first round were invited to the SOI Day at ETH Zürich. The event took place at the Auditorium Maximum on April 27, 2004.

Like in the year before, a number of interesting talks were scheduled. In his demonstration of the simulation of thre-dimensional objects, Matthias Teschner from the Institute for Computational Science hurled a number of virtual cows through the air and let them melt like water. Professor Hromkovi? from the stunned the audience with some amazing paradoxes in the field of complexity theory.

In the afternoon, the programs of the Bchustbaenrehenifloge task competed live against each other. The text to be repaired was extracted from a current newspaper edition and scrambled under the supervision of the audience itself.

Finally, the ranking list of the first round was disclosed and the participants of the second round were announced. As in the year before, a number of special prizes were handed out for special achievements - including again special rewards for participants under 16 years.

The second round ofthe SOI 2004 was again hosted by IBM Learning Services in Zürich-Altstetten. In the afternoon of Monday, 17.5.2004, the 27 best participants of the first round had the opportunity to get accustomed to the environment in the practice session. The competition itself took place the following day.

As in the previous year, Linux was offered as an alternate operating system to Windows and it was used by several participants. The introduction of Linux in the second round was made possible through a cooperation with the association «Swiss Open Systems User Group» (/ch/open), represented by Joe Amman.

In the second round, the choice of programming languages was limited to Pascal (using Borlands Delphi 7 compiler) and C++ (using the Visual Studio .NET by Microsoft or gcc on the Linux platform).

The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) took place from September 11 to 18 in Athens. 324 participants from 80 countries took part in the event.

Switzerland was represented by the four top participants of the second round:

• Samuel Berner from Buchs (AG)
• Vladimir Serbinenko from Villarimboud (FR)
• Philipp Krähenbühl from Felben-Wellhausen (TG)
• Sebastian Millius from Brig-Glis (VS)

Samuel Berner and Vladimir Serbinenko each scored a Bronze medal.

The IOI 2004 resided in the media center that was specially and originally built for the Olympic Games. Throughout the whole week, the participants, team leaders and guests enjoyed a very diversified programme of activities. The Swiss team jointly compiled an illustrated report of the IOI. For more visual impressions you are invited to have a look at the picture gallery.