SACO Online Camp

This is rather (very) late notice, but starting at 11:00 GMT (13:00 SA time) tomorrow (Saturday 15 December) we will be hosting the first of several training camps to select the South African IOI team.

We're continuing on from the SACO and opening it up to the public in the form of an online contest, so you're all welcome to join. We'll be accepting submissions in any of Java, C/C++, Pascal, Python and Haskell. Haskell is an unusual one on the list -- this is the first time we'll be making it available so we'd love to see some FP gurus show us what they got! The contest will consist of three problems and you'll have five hours to solve them, followed by an online discussion via IRC.

Registration and further details is available here:

http://olympiad.cs.uct.ac.za/contest.html

On a related matter, we recently expanded the size of our training squad from six to twelve. The training has always been limited in the past to the six medallists from the SACO. This year we've invited the top six non-matrics outside the medals. Unfortunately they are not eligible to make the IOI team, but we will be trying to change that for next year. The goal is to catch the good ones at a younger age, which is what the Mathematics Olympiad is already good at doing. It's also another reason why we're opening up these contests to the public.