We discuss CUECARD, the program that won the 2008 Computer Olympiad computational pool tournament. Beside addressing intrinsic interest in a complex competitive environment with unique features, our goal is to isolate the factors that contributed to the performance so that the lessons can be transferred to other, similar domains. Specifically, we distinguish among pure engineering factors (such...

Players of complex board games like backgammon, chess and go, were always wondering what the best opening moves for their favourite game are. In the last decade, computer analysis has offered more insight to many opening variations. This is especially true for backgammon, where computer rollouts have radically changed the way human experts play the opening. In this paper we use Palamedes, the w...

The game of Hex is a beautiful and mind-challenging game with simple rules and a strategic complexity comparable to that of Chess and Go. Hex positions do not tend to decompose into sums of independent positions. Nevertheless, we demonstrate how to reduce evaluation of Hex positions to topological analysis of a hierarchy of simpler positions, and we develop corresponding recursive calculus. We ...

1. INTRODUCTION. We say that a set S of 2n + 1 points in the plane is in general position if no three of the points are collinear and no four are concyclic. We call a circle halving with respect to S if it has three points of S on its circumference, n − 1 points in its interior, and n − 1 in its exterior. The goal of this paper is to prove the following surprising fact: any set of 2n + 1 points...

L'évolution rapide des systèmes d'information gérant des données de plus en plus volumineuses a causé de profonds changements de paradigme dans le travail de statisticien, devenant successivement prospecteur de données, bio-informaticien et maintenant data scientist. Sans souci d'exhaustivité et après avoir illustré ces mutations successives, cet article présente brièvement les nouvelles questi...

We present our effort to enhance a bio-specimen repository search application with semantic search capability. We describe the nature of the original data, the application of text processing tools, and the leveraging of existing terminologies and ontologies to build an application ontology that supports the bio-specimen search system. We also describe few of the difficulties we have encountered...

A study was carried out among 76 students who took part in the Olympiad contests practical medical skills an innovative distance format. The data obtained testify to effectiveness of simulation training, assessment which by answering test questions before and after passing task, as well assessing students' actions during remote passage scenario experts.

Recently, a backgammon bot named Palamedes won the first prize in backgammon at the 16 Computer Olympiad. Palamedes is an ongoing work aimed at developing intelligent bots to play a variety of popular backgammon variants. Currently, the Greek variants Portes, Plakoto and Fevga are supported. A different neural network has been designed, trained and evaluated for each one of these variants. This...

Each year a wealth of informatics olympiads are held worldwide at national, regional and international levels, all of which require engaging and challenging tasks that have not been seen before. Nevertheless, creating high quality tasks can be a difficult and time-consuming process. In this paper we explore some of the different techniques that problem setters can use to find new ideas for task...