Australian Informatics Olympiad

The Australian Informatics Olympiad is a computer programming competition for Australian high school students run by the Australian Informatics Olympiad Committee (AIOC). The Committee, a Department Of the Australian Mathematics Trust (AMT) , holds the 4 hour competition in early September each year. The competition began as the Australian Informatics Competition (AIC) in 1998, and in 2005, was divided into Intermediate and Senior divisions and renamed as the Australian Informatics Olympiad, when the AIC became a pen-and-paper competition. In 2008, the competition will be run on Thursday, 4 September.

AIOC Activities

The AIOC is the organising body for the:

• Australian Informatics Competition (AIC)
• Australian Informatics Olympiad (AIO)
• December School of Excellence
• Australian Invitational Informatics Olympiad
• French-Australian Regional Informatics Olympiad
• April International Olympiad in Informatics Team Selection School

The AIOC also organised the inaugural 2007 Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad.

The AIOC is responsible for selecting and taking a team of the four best-performing high school informatics students to participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics.

The AIOC manages an informatics contest server which also acts as a training site for students with over one hundred accessible problems and real-time evaluation of uploaded solutions.

Competitions

Since its creation in 2005, the AIC (Australian Informatics Competition) is the only pen-and-paper competition organised by the AIOC which does not involve the use of a computer or knowledge of programming. The AIC tests problem-solving skills similar to those used in solving more difficult problems in competitions requiring programming. The questions are of multiple choice and short answer format for optical reading and computer marking. There exist three divisions: Senior (years 11 and 12), Intermediate (years 9 and 10) and Junior (years 7 and 8).

Initiated in 1998, the annual AIO (Australian Informatics Olympiad) is a nation-wide computer programming competition sat by students in early September. The competition is four hours long with four programming questions, and is split into Senior (years 11 and 12) and Intermediate (years 7 to 10) divisions. Based on these results, approximately 12 students are selected to attend a 10-day training school at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Note: From 1998 to 2004, the AIO was termed the AIC, as no pen-and-paper competition existed. In 2005, the old AIC computer science competition was renamed to AIO and the new pen-and-paper competition took the name AIC

The Australian Invitational Informatics Olympiad (AIIO) held annually in February since 2006 is open only to the students selected to attend the previous year's December School of Excellence. Results of the AIIO contribute to the selection of 8 students to attend the April IOI Team Selection School, and to a lesser extent, the selection of the four members of the team itself. The AIIO is more difficult than the AIO and requires knowledge of basic algorithms learned in the December school.

The French-Australian Regional Informatics Olympiad (FARIO) is a joint-managed competition organised by both the AIOC and France-IOI. The competition began in 2004 and is open to any interested students in France and Australia. Results from the FARIO are also used along with the AIIO to select eight students for the April IOI Team Selection School and IOI team selection.

Australian IOI Medalists

The 2008 IOI team members are Xi Chen, Jarrah Lacko, Jack Murray and Harry Slatyer.

The following table lists all Australian IOI medalists ordered by colour and number of medals, then by last year a medal was received. B represents a Bronze medal, S a Silver and G a Gold.

External links

• http://orac.amt.edu.au/ (Informatics activities)
• http://orac.amt.edu.au/aioc/train (Training site)
• http://www.amt.edu.au/aic.html (AIC Overview)
• http://www.amt.edu.au/aio.html (AIO Overview)
• http://www.amt.edu.au/ioiol.html (Former Australian Informatics Olympians)