OLYMPIADS IN INFORMATICS
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OLYMPIADS IN INFORMATICS, 2008, Vol. 2, 181-191
© Institute of Mathematics and Informatics,

ISSN 1822-7732

What Do Olympiad Tasks Measure?

Troy VASIGA^a, Gordon CORMACK^a, Graeme KEMKES^b

^bDepartment of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1 Canada E-mail: gdkemkes@math.uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

At all levels of difficulty, the principal focus of olympiad tasks should be problem solving. Implementation complexity, esoteric knowledge requirements and mystery distract from problem solving, particularly for problems deemed to be of low or intermediate difficulty. We suggest criteria for analysing potential tasks and illustrate these criteria by examining several tasks.

Keywords:

computing competitions, problem solving

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