Swiss Olympiad in Informatics

For the first qualification round there are two tracks: a practical track, which focuses on the actual programming and a theoretical track which aims at the mathematical and computer science aspects. You may choose to follow either track to participate (or both if you like).

The first round starts October 1st, 2009 and ends November 30th, 2009

Please check the rules and the general information below before you start participating.

By tradition there is always a special task in the first round, which does not ask for a perfect solution, but rather requires ingenuity and some good ideas to be tackled. By turning your strategy into an efficient program, you can take part in the tournament that will be hosted on the SOI Day. There all the submitted programs will compete against each other to elicit the best solution.

Note: this part of the first round does not count directly for the qualification of round 2 (it is not mandatory to qualify for the second round), but the two best solutions will get a place in the Davos-Camp (assuming you qualify for the second round).

The Swiss Olympiad in Informatics is the national qualification for the IOI, its international counterpart. The SOI aims to select and educate the four students that represent our country at the International Olympiad in Informatics.

The International Olympiad in Informatics is one of 6 scientific olympiads. It is the world championship in programming. Each year next to 300 participants from about 80 different countries compete against each other to win gold, silver or bronze medal. Every country can send four participants.

The participants with the highest scores in the theoretical and practical track (distributed evenly) proceed to the second round. The best Round 1 participants will also be invited to a preparation camp in Davos – a five days long camp held in February, where the best participants are trained on IOI like tasks, take interesting lectures and have the opportunity to meet each other. Round 2 will be a mixed round consisting of an online contest with practical tasks and an on-site theoretical test. The best participants of Round 2 are invited to the Final Round, which is composed of four programming contests on two weekends, held on-site in Zurich. The best four students travel to Canada where the IOI 2010 takes place. Free one week trip to Canada: sounds appealing, right?

• You learn a lot of interesting things about computer science.
• You meet a lot of people with similar or the same interests.
• You can win a free trip to a foreign country.
• You can participate in three camps that are not solely about programming.

• You can participate if you have been born on 1. July 1990 or later and you are enrolled at a swiss school (high-school, vocational school, etc) located in Switzerland during the period September to December 2009.
• To participate, you need to register at the web page of SOI and set your status to Participant
• You must participate under your own name.
• We strongly encourage you to study from books and internet and exchange ideas with friends but do not copy any solutions (neither sourcecode nor the description) from these sources.
• Solve the tasks on your own.

The qualification for the second round will be evenly distributed among these two parts. The best 30 participants of both round will qualify for the second round. Please note that this is quite a lot and it is usually not necessary to solve all the tasks to score under the top 30. Therefore, by all means submit your solution even if you only solved one or two tasks. You can choose either one of the two tracks (or both, if you like). The best 12 participants of both parts will qualify for the Davos-camp, an all-inclusive trainingsweek which will take place from 8.-12. Februar 2010 in Davos. Two of the Davos-Camp places are reserved for the best results of the creativity task (as long as they also qualify for the second round). The rest will be evenly distributed among the two parts (therefore top 5 of both tracks as well as top 2 of the creativity task).

After correction and grading, the results for the first round will be published on the SOI day, which will be held at ETH in Zurich, 16th of January 2010. Besides the results there will be some interesting talks by guest speakers, as well as the long awaited tournament for the creativity task.