OLYMPIADS IN INFORMATICS, 2016, Vol. 10, pp. 73 - 85
© IOI, Vilnius University

ISSN 1822-7732

DOI: 10.15388/ioi.2016.05

Watch them Fight! Creativity Task Tournaments of the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics

Samuel GRÜTTER, Daniel GRAF, Benjamin SCHMID

Swiss Olympiad in Informatics
e-mail: {samuel,daniel,benjamin}@soi.ch

Abstract

As part of the qualification process for the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics, the contestants are each year confronted with one “Creativity Task”. Unlike typical problems in programming competitions, creativity tasks usually do not have an optimal solution, and are often adaptations of popular board or computer games. After receiving all submissions, a tournament is organized, where the students can watch how their programs play interactively against each other, and points are awarded to the authors according to the tournament ranking. We present and discuss this task format in general, as well as the specific creativity tasks of the past 10 years, accompanied by an online archive of the task descriptions, sample solutions and game servers. Moreover, we describe our task selection process and criteria, the task creation process, and the experience gained and best practices established in the past years. Finally, we present the many advantages of this task format, showing why we think it is a refreshing alternative to the common IOI-style tasks given in most national selection rounds.

Keywords:

creativity tasks, interactive tasks, heuristics, programming competition, board games, artificial intelligence contest, tournaments, task visualization.


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Copyright © International Olympiads in Informatics, Vilnius University Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, 2016