Definition
Plain language
The world championship programming contest for high-school students.
As stated in the literature
International Olympiad in Informatics; each problem is split into scored subtasks with partial credit, and contestants get five hours and a capped number of judged submissions.
Also called: International Olympiad in Informatics
Why it matters: Its subtask scoring hands back a detailed map of what a solution can and cannot do, which makes it far easier to improve on the next attempt.
For example, a student might earn 40 out of 100 points on a problem by writing a program that only handles the smaller inputs correctly.
Heard on the show
“A thirty-billion-parameter model sat the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics — the world championship of competitive programming — and scored 291 out of 600.”Episode 258 — The Same Weights Scored 291, Then 468 — What Changed Was the Loop