If a Nobel Prize in informatics existed, who should have received it this year?

From the algorithms side, strong contenders in my opinion would be the authors of the new single-source shortest paths algorithms (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17033 ), as it improved the very well known algorithm from over 60 years ago, but perhaps a bigger breakthrough occurred somewhere in the AI space?

We're excited to announce that the Call for Tasks for the IOI 2026 is officially open!

The Host Scientific Committee for IOI 2026 would love to invite everyone (except for potential contestants) to submit their tasks. If you know anyone who might be interested in creating problems, please share this message with them.

We welcome tasks of all difficulty levels, but we'd especially appreciate submissions for easier problems. They can be some of the most challenging to create, and we always need more of them.

You can submit your tasks through the following link, where you'll also find more details about both the problems themselves and the submission process: https://ioi2026.uz/call-for-tasks.

The deadline for the call for tasks is January 5th, 2026, 23:59 UTC+5.

For any questions please reach out to hsc [at] ioi2026.uz.

It has just been announced that IOI 2028 will be hosted in Japan, and IOI 2029 will be hosted in Bulgaria!

I already complained that 1000 was just a normal round and some people suggested that round 1024 will be celebrated. Guess it is not. :(

We are excited to announce that the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics (BOI) 2025 will take place this week in Toruń, Poland.

The official contest will be held:

• Dates: Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27
• Time: 09:00 — 14:00 (Central European Summer Time, UTC+2)
• Live scoreboard: ranking.boi25.pl*

The public mirror contest will be held:

• Dates: Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27
• Time: 10:00 — 15:00 (Central European Summer Time, UTC+2)
• Contest link: mirror.boi25.pl (available starting Friday, April 25th)
• Registration for the mirror contest will be available starting Friday, April 25 at 10:00 (CEST, UTC+2).
• A practice session will be held on Friday, April 25, from 16:30 to 23:59 (CEST, UTC+2).

Technical details:

• Format: IOI-style problems and scoring system.
• Available languages: C++ and Python.
• For all technical details, see the official website at boi25.pl.
• The problem statements will be provided in English and national languages of the participating countries.**

Stay tuned for updates and good luck in the contest!

— BOI 2025 Organising Team

* The scoreboard will be turned on after the mirror contest starts (after 10:00).

** Assuming delegations choose to translate them. If your country participates in BOI and you are interested in problems statements in your national language, please check with your BOI delegation.

Update: The second day of the contest starts in 3 hours (at 10:00, CEST, UTC+2 time).

Source: https://icpc.global/regionals/rules

I just want to say that I'm a huge fan of how the ICPC doesn't seem to care about their own rules.

Based on this announcement, currently it is just a normal div. 2 round. Such a milestone should be celebrated and recognised properly. It should be a big contest rated for everyone, ideally with prizes.

It's me again, with another short summary of what happened this year in competitive programming. See the last year's summary here.

• The 2022 and 2023 ICPC World Finals were finally held on April 18, 2024, in Luxor, Egypt. Peking University (jiangly, lyx_cjz, yasugongshang) emerged as the champions of the 2022 edition, while the 2023 edition was won by the National Research University Higher School of Economics (teraqqq, Ormlis, Kirill22).
• From June 19 to 23, the inaugural Universal Cup Summer Summit took place in Cancun, Mexico. Among the 11 teams invited onsite, USA1 (ecnerwala, tourist, ksun48) claimed victory. The finals will be held in Februrary 2025, in Dongguan, China.
• On July 12, the AtCoder World Finals were held in Tokyo, Japan. Representing the United States, ecnerwala secured the championship and a prize of ¥500,000.
• The 4th European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics was hosted in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, from July 21 to 27. prvocislo from Slovakia won the competition for the second consecutive time and received her fourth gold medal.
• The 8th European Junior Olympiad in Informatics took place in Chișinău, Moldova, from August 16 to 22. rolandpetrean from Romania emerged as the winner. It was also announced that the next edition would be held in Azerbaijan.
• In late August, tourist surpassed the symbolic milestone of 4000 rating points on Codeforces, earning a new and special rank.
• The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) 2024 was conducted from September 1 to 8 in Alexandria, Egypt. zhoukangyang from China clinched the championship. During the event, it was revealed that IOI 2027 would be hosted in Germany.
• On September 19, the 2024 ICPC World Finals took place in Astana, Kazakhstan. Peking University (xay5421, wasa855, LJC00118) secured another victory this year. However, no venue for the 2025 finals has been announced yet.
• On December 3, the Yandex Cup 2024 was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The algorithm track was won by Kapt, who took home a grand prize of ₽500,000.
• The final major event of the year, the Meta Hacker Cup 2024, was held online on December 7. TLE triumphed, earning the championship title and a $20,000 prize.

Happy New Year! Let's see what AI will bring us in 2025.

Please don't shoot the messenger.

https://ioinformatics.org/news/ioi-response-to-the-conflict-in-gaza/52

We’re excited to share that the Universal Cup Summer Summit 2024, sponsored by Huawei, just wrapped up in the beautiful Cancun, Mexico!

The highlight of the event was the 2nd Universal Cup Semifinal, where 200 teams competed both onsite and online.

A huge shoutout to all our onsite teams:

Gold Medal

• USA1 (ecnerwala, ksun48, tourist)

Silver Medal

• Polish Mafia (Swistakk, Radewoosh, Marcin_smu)

Bronze Medal

• HoMaMaOvO (maroonrk, maspy, hos.lyric)

Honourable Mention

• 03 Slimes (zhoukangyang, heuristica, TLE)
• Amstelpark (PavelKunyavskiy, cdkrot, LHiC)
• Let it Rot (skip2004, p_b_p_b, Warriors_fsy)
• Almost Retired Dandelion (Um_nik, Merkurev, KAN)
• yosupo (yosupo, sigma425, sugim48)
• Speed Star (YoshikaMiyafuji, noimi)
• Yolki-palki (Pechalka, Kapt, Tikhon228)
• Mei Dui Yao (Crysfly, froggyzhang)

And our top ten online teams:

Online Champions

• UT a.k.a Is (yutaka1999, yokozuna57, HIR180)

First Prize (places 2-3)

• 飞带长队 (275307894a, A_zjzj, crazy_sea)
• 哈姆？哈姆！ (njwrz, qiuzx, sjcsjcsjc)

Second Prize (places 4-10)

• tritr (tute7627, rin204, SPD_9X2)
• japan406364961 (kotatsugame, Nyaan, risujiroh)
• Dvoe protiv vetra (Egor, pashka, qwerty787788)
• TEMP team name (BreakPlay)
• open your brain (aaaaawa, wygzgyw, Blood_Wu_Ren)
• 我再也不会笑了 (IceYukino, pp_orange, flying)
• Nemesis (-14, Imakf, zhangjianjuncd)

You can check out the full results here: https://contest.ucup.ac/contest/1708/standings

If you are interested in the solutions of the problems and stories behind the problem setting: We are going to release a post-contest analysis report soon! We will post it after we finish it.

We also invite you to watch the streams from the semifinal:

• English stream
• Chinese stream

For more info about the Universal Cup and how to join the fun, visit our website at https://ucup.ac/. If you’re interested in participating this season, head over to the Registration page.

Thanks to everyone who joined us and made this event amazing! In particular, huge thanks to all the organizers:

• chenjb
• Qingyu
• xiaowuc1
• lperovskaya
• PavelKunyavskiy
• Dup4
• and kostka :)

Finally here are some pics with the spectacular Semifinal Champions:

See you next time!

... has started today. Best of luck to all the participants!

Is anyone aware of any mirror?

The website: https://ceoi2024.fi.muni.cz/

EJOI 2024 is scheduled to take place in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, from August 16th to August 22nd, 2024.

The next update is scheduled for 12 January 2024, when we plan to announce the new ICPC World Finals schedule. The World Finals will not be scheduled before April 2024.

Today is January 13th. Did I miss something, or have they not announced anything yet?

Happy New Year to everyone who's already stepped into 2024, and to those of us still hanging out in 2023! I usually like to spend a bit of time looking back at the year that's been. So, let's dive into this little trip down memory lane together and see what 2023 had in store for us!

• On January 19th, the Universal Cup was launched as an alternative to the OpenCup, primarily to facilitate systematic training for teams with a focus on preparing for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). In its inaugural season, the Universal Cup attracted participation from 750 teams, representing over 300 organizations worldwide, which participated in 22 stages.
• From February 18th to 26th, the first edition of the Osijek Competitive Programming Camp took place. A total of 74 teams participated, with 13 teams attending the event in person in Osijek, Croatia. The second edition of the camp occurred in September.
• Also in February, Google announced the discontinuation of its Coding Competitions (Code Jam, Kick Start, and Hash Code) after two decades. The final, farewell rounds were conducted on April 15th.
• Around the same period, it was revealed that the Topcoder Open 2023 would be the final event of its series, initially planned to be held virtually. However, this virtual event was later canceled entirely.
• The 3rd European Girls' Olympiad in Informatics was held from July 15th to 21st in Lund, Sweden. The event saw participation from approximately 50 delegations, with prvocislo from Slovakia emerging as the winner.
• The International Olympiad in Informatics 2023 took place from August 28th to September 4th in Szeged, Hungary. The competition was narrowly won by Rebelz from China, with a one-point margin over fellow Chinese competitor cnnfls_csy. Additionally, it was announced that IOI 2026 would be hosted in Uzbekistan.
• A week later, the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics was held in Kutaisi, Georgia, from September 8th to 14th, marking the 7th edition and the first on-site event post-pandemic. The winner was andreystefanov from Bulgaria.
• On September 8th and 9th, the AtCoder World Finals were conducted in Tokyo, Japan. This event marked the first significant international open on-site competition post-pandemic, featuring top competitors from AtCoder Race Rankings between 2019 and 2022. jiangly secured victory, earning a prize of ¥500,000.
• On October 27th, the ICPC World Finals organizers announced the postponement of the 2022-2023 World Finals, initially scheduled for November 12-17 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to late Q1 or early Q2 of 2024, with exact dates yet to be confirmed.
• The Yandex Cup World Finals took place on December 2nd in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The algorithmic competition was won by ksun48 of Canada, who received a grand prize of ₽500,000.
• Finally, on December 9th, the final round of Meta Hacker Cup (formerly Facebook Hacker Cup) was held as an online event. The winner, tourist, achieved a perfect score of 100 points, claiming a $20,000 prize.

I skipped some of the smaller events, for instance APIO or ICPC regionals, as I tried to keep only the biggest event for each audience. Please let me know in the comments if I forgot about something else.

Thanks for reading and being a part of this community!

Is there any website where I can find statements/tests from past ICPC regionals? Can be unofficial as well. I found https://icpcarchive.github.io/, but a lot of contests are missing and they don't have tests.

IOI 2023 starts tomorrow in Szeged, Hungary!

I usually try to create a list of participants before the competition starts, but this year I was pretty busy, so minhcool created one here: https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/116735.

I still wanted to do something, but as the official list of participants was also published, I decided to make an aggregated list using both of these sources and for the first time I was able to use the photos of the participants.

Enjoy: https://kostka.dev/ioi/23/

If something is incorrect or missing (sometimes I wasn't able to match the Codeforces handles to the names), let me know here.

Does it mean that FHC is cancelled as well?

I want to try something new. We are preparing a publication with solutions to some of the problems from the Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics and I want to include some problems from the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics as well. As I have never seen these problems, I need to spend some time to familiarize myself with them. Normally I would solve them on my own, but maybe I can try to stream my attempts and implement these solutions live.

This is going to be a completely new experience for me and it might be a complete disaster, but at least I hope it is going to be entertaining in a way. I am also a bit rusty, but I hope I can handle the problems for juniors. Feel free to join me to say hi, or to tell me why you think I am very annoying.

https://twitch.tv/kostkadev (I plan to start at 5pm UTC on Aug 7th)

Update: VOD can be found here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1892596888. I had fun so maybe I will continue it at some point.

(source)

:q

Don't you think that most of the current programming competitions are boring and monotonous? Can you think of something that could be more entertaining, especially for the viewers?

Let's brainstorm together. You can do whatever you want! How about extremely long 24-hour rounds? 5v5 match-ups with 10 computers? Or maybe a timer that starts at 1 hour at the beginning of the competition and goes up only if you solve a problem, so you literally fight only against the clock and see your rivals being eliminated? Alternatively, is there something from the existing competitions that you really enjoy and don't want to lose?

... takes place in Sweden this week. The scoreboard is available here: https://egoi23.se/scoreboard/

I am not aware of any mirrors.

It was announced that EJOI 2023 will take place in Kutaisi, Georgia between September 8th and 14th.

https://ejoi2023.kiu.edu.ge/

This is a follow-up to https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/113201.

It was announced in this month's town hall: https://youtu.be/QXmI7QV5FP0 (starts at min 16), that the finals will not be conducted at all.

I had a very heated debate with Radewoosh about how we should colour-code some of the results.

We both agree that the "Accepted" result has to be green and "Wrong answer" has to be red. But we had slightly different opinions about "Time limit exceeded". Surprisingly we both found people that agreed with our views. I don't want to bias you in any way, so I am not going to say it here, but what colour do you see when you think "TLE"? What about "Runtime Error" / "Memory Limit Exceeded" / "Compilation Error" / "Pending Judgement"?

Do they still take place? The website has been down since forever and I cannot find any info.