Swiss Olympiad in Informatics

In order to promote the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics, more than 30'000 posters and brochures were dispatched in January. These went to over 1400 secondary schools, 420 vocational schools, and more than 550 libraries all over Switzerland. And the resonance was remarkable indeed. At the deadline for the registrations, March 23, 2003, 254 registrations had been placed, out of which 102 finally sent in their programs.

The canton Tessins participated for the first time in the history of the SOI.

The number of female participants increased sixfold compared to the year before. A contributing factor was doubtlessly the special workshop for women that was held in cooperation with the «Stelle für Chancengleicheit für Frau und Mann» as well as the «Frauenförderung am Departement Informatik».

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 30, 2003.

Like in the year before, a number of interesting talks were scheduled. Daniel Steiner took the participants on a tour through the houase of the future. Reinhold Thurner of SwissICT explained the intricacies and pitfalls of software engineering, and Martin Hirt perplexed the audience with some new paradoxes in the field of cryptography.

In the afternoon, the programs of the Handwriting task competed live against each other. They had to recognise a batch of words taken directly from the people in the audience.

Finally, the ranking list of the first round was disclosed and the prizes were distributed. A number of special prizes were handed out for special achievements. The SOI 2003 introduced a new competition for participants under 16 years. This competition featured a dedicated ranking list and separate prizes.

In 2002, a report on the SOI was broadcast on Swiss Radio DRS. This was topped with a televised report about the SOI Day, filmed by a team of the TV programme «Computer-Flash» (now zzoom). The programme was subsequently aired on several local TV stations.

The second round ofthe SOI 2003 was again hosted by IBM Learning Services in Zürich-Altstetten. In the afternoon of Monday, 23.6.2003, 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 a première, Linux was offered as an alternate operating system to Windows. Two participants rose to this occasion, one of whom, Jonas Wagner, excelled by reaching the first place. 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 14. International Olympiad in Informatics was held in Kenosha in the US state of Wisconsin from August 16-23, 2004.

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

• Anthony Bagwell from Dully (VD)
• Jonas Wagner from Boll (BE)
• Nicolas Cepeda from Altstetten (ZH)
• Simon Felix from Klingnau (AG)

The IOI 2003 resided on the campus of the University of Winconsin-Parkside. 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