The International Olympiad in Informatics is a worldwide contest for high school students, with a strong focus on creativity and ingenuity in algorithm design. Here we describe the activities in Australia that support and complement this contest, including a range of programming competitions, more accessible penand-paper competitions, and other enrichment and training activities. Sample problem...

Currently in the literature, there is a dearth of empirical research that confirms whether international junior success is a reliable predictor for future international senior success. Despite the uncertainty of the junior-senior relationship, federations and coaches still tend to use junior success as a predictor for long-term senior success. A range of former investigations utilising a retros...

A health and weight awareness program was initiated in 1995 by the Tonga National Food and Nutrition Committee to combat a high prevalence of obesity and its associated non-communicable diseases. The strategy of the program was to provide a fun activity in which people wanted to join, and at the same time gain health benefits. Three successive weight loss competitions were organized, of 4 to 6 ...

This paper studies equilibrium behavior in a class of games that models asymmetric competitions with unconditional and conditional investments. Such competitions include lobbying settings, labor-market tournaments, and R&D races, among others. I provide an algorithm that constructs the unique equilibrium in these games, and apply it to study competitions in which a fraction of each competitor’s...

This paper describes the robust reading competitions for ICDAR 2003. With the rapid growth in research over the last few years on recognizing text in natural scenes, there is an urgent need to establish some common benchmark datasets, and gain a clear understanding of the current state of the art. We use the term robust reading to refer to text images that are beyond the capabilities of current...

On June 28, 2011 the International Computer Games Association (ICGA) disqualified and banned the program RYBKA and its programmer Vasik Rajlich from previous and future World Computer Chess Championships (WCCC). The ICGA has conducted an investigation into allegations that, in the chess program RYBKA, two other programs were plagiarized: CRAFTY and FRUIT. It was found that the allegations were ...

This paper develops a theoretical model to show the effects of simultaneously having both a competition between groups and one among the individuals of a tournament. The players are divided up among teams and compete for a flat bonus for winning the team competition. At the same time, their efforts also determine if they will win another flat bonus from winning the individual game among all the...

In principle, running a competition of solvers is easy: one just needs to collect solvers and benchmarks, run the experiments and publish the results. In practice, there are a number of issues that must be dealt with. This paper attempts to summarize the experience accumulated during the organization of several competitions: pseudo-Boolean, SAT and CSP/MaxCSP competitions.

Microbial communities are typically incredibly diverse, with many species contributing to the overall function of the community. The structure of these communities is the result of many complex biotic and abiotic factors. In this thesis, my colleagues and I employ a bottom-up approach to investigate the role of interspecies interactions in determining the structure of multispecies communities. ...

Coursebooks discussing graph algorithms usually have a chapter on minimum spanning trees. It usually contains Prim’s and Kruskal’s algorithms [1, 2] but often lacks other applications. This type of problem is rarely present at informatics competitions or in tests in secondary or higher level informatics education This article is aimed at describing some competition tasks that help us prove that...