Well, India isn’t good at IOI because it weighs JEE (entrance exam) over Olympiad prep. I’ve heard that countries like China and Russia have dedicated honour classes for really bright students, nothing like this exists in Indian schools.

You gotta use the real "GDP:" PPP

It's probably just IQ + culture

I think it's probably because of culture and I feel bad about it besides the administration never took such push to change it here in Bangladesh, we lack community in high schools probably till 12th maybe 99.99% students know nothing about informatics

Btw, here is the correlation between national $$$IQ$$$ and IOI rank if anyone is wondering. The correlation is $$$|r| \approx .68$$$. I'm not quite sure why you don't provide the correlations for your scatterplots (this is the second time you've done this), but I think it is clear that the correlation between $$$IQ$$$ and IOI rank is higher than the correlation between $$$GDP$$$ and IOI rank. This is probably because $$$IQ$$$ is a cause of both $$$GDP$$$ and IOI rank, so looking at the latter correlation is looking at two effects.

Some caveats: I just googled IOI country rank and clicked on the first page, so that's where the data came from. I also had to omit a few countries that Richard Lynn didn't have $$$IQ$$$ data for, such as Macao, China (I'm not sure if this is a country or what). I also didn't include the ones that don't exist anymore, like Yugoslavia. Overall, $$$n = 106$$$.

The correlation might be slightly deflated, as there is some range restriction near the right side of the graph. Specifically, there was no way to differentiate between the countries with no medals at all, so I guess they were just sorted in alphabetical order on the page. I still have included them, but this is important to note.

In Bangladesh, many young students are interested in programming, but few know about IOI, and most lack support from family or school. Even among high school students, very few pursue competitive programming. We face two main problems: 1) lack of support, and 2) academic pressure and limited time. Parents, teachers, and society often don’t value technology, so they discourage CP. Even with family support, students often lack proper guidance or mentors. Those who succeed usually grind alone, relying on luck and skill. We have potential, but these barriers prevent us from unlocking it.

He was such a big supporter of Olympiads and elites that still Olympiad participants and elites flee the country because of him. C'mon.

Maybe I could share some insights about China, though I’m not one of those who have the ability to participate in the IOI. So, I can only share some reasons that apply to all OIers in China.

First, the huge population definitely brings a lot of benefits. There are about 27,000 students participating in the provincial-level contest for high school students (CSP-S). Note that middle school and elementary school students can also join. If we include CSP-J, which is for younger students, the total number reaches about 65,000 students who are all studying informatics olympiad (OI). And you only need to select 4 people from all of them—I suppose that’s not really a hard problem.

Another important reason relates to culture. In China, education is highly valued because most parents see studying as the only and best way to move up the social ladder—specifically, through the highly competitive college entrance examination. If you achieve a high score in OI (for example, by ranking in the top 50 at the National Olympiad in Informatics, or NOI), you can gain admission to China’s best universities without taking the entrance exam. Even if you rank around 100th at the provincial level, you can still receive some benefits during university admissions. In the past, this meant direct admission to good universities; now, it usually means being admitted with a score reduction of about 10–20 points (the maximum score is 750). So, it’s not hard to understand why many parents encourage their children to study OI.

With so many people studying OI and all striving to achieve high scores in contests, there will definitely be some truly talented and hardworking students who get selected to compete in the IOI.

Additionally, schools also have a strong incentive to foster outstanding OI performers. Excellent competition results not only enhance the school’s reputation but also help attract better students. High rankings in contests like CSP-S and NOI are seen as markers of educational quality, which in turn draws more talented and motivated applicants. This creates a positive cycle where strong OI programs contribute to the school’s overall competitiveness.

I think that Germany could definitely do better.

First of all, most European countries' universities (with the exception of the UK, which seems to care about a multitude of factors) value your grades at school over your Olympiad results, yet many students in Europe would prefer to stay in Europe, so naturally, we invest more time into that. However, the German school system, for example, forces you to study a broad variety of subjects instead of few subjects in-depth, contrary to the Chinese or the UK system. Because of the high value of our school grades, we don't have much time for IOI training, resulting in less topics being covered.

Secondly, Germany's IOI training qualification process is complicated and tedious, involving a long-term competition, the Bundeswettbewerb Informatik, which is much more similar to writing an actual scientific paper than to the IOI. Then, from the top 70 of participants in that, we choose people through actual IOI-style qualification contests.

Finally, to be honest, in my opinion, the training isn't the best for encouraging people to participate in it. People travel for hours to live in cheap hostels for a few days, write two to three contests and depart again. It could be made much more attractive — we do have sponsors.

I don't know about the correlations, but I must express that the ranking method you have chosen is somewhat perplexing. I would definitely put a 69-41-17 split over 22-53-55, it makes little sense to order countries by total number of medals.

Usually there are a few strong schools behind the strong IOI performance, each school has at least one dedicated rock start teacher.

At first I found their rank highly related to the most right column of the medal table, but then I realized my mistake.

You can easily conclude that all top 10 countries have a national olympiad and have a good team selection method.

The way I see it to make progress is by encouraging participation in olympiads, like:

• Money prizes (9 countries out of the top 10 does it)
• University admission (10/10)
• National Olympiads (10/10)
• Training camps (10/10)

And it depends on those 4 things how good are they provided.

To improve the plot, you should flip the rank (0 is worse) and the axes, so it's more readable since we want to "predict" how good the rank is from the GDP.

Also, it would be good to see a plot with the GDP instead of the GDP per capita, like a country composed of only 10 random billionaires clearly wouldn't win the IOI.

Another thing that I observe is that if you remove the countries that have obtained a high GDP due to politics or geography, rather than being an industrial or intellectual power, {such as UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (oil), Mauritius (tax haven), Iceland (I think geography helped a lot there)}, you get a much better correlation of GDP per capita with IOI rank.

I think the rank is more correlated with the scientific culture of the country, or more specifically the "science olympiad culture" which is correlated with GDP in general, not unlike the "sports olympiad culture" where you see the same trend.

Edit: I made a plot of a linear model based on log(population) and log(GDP per capita) https://imgur.com/a/MJVk0Dt