Four Western Cape learners will represent South Africa at the annual International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) which starts on Monday 3 September in Japan.
The four learners are Emile Tredoux (Parklands College), Ralph McDougall (Curro Durbanville), Tian Cilliers (Stellenbosch High) and Taariq Mowzer (Fairbairn College, winner of the SA Programming Olympiad, 2017). All are strong mathematically – three of them also represented the country in the International Mathematics Olympiad in Romania two months ago, where Emile earned a bronze medal. For this Olympiad they code in C++, in which they are coached by university students.
After achieving the top places in the South African Programming Olympiad in October 2017, they underwent intensive training. By March, after three weekend training contests, these four were the clear leaders in programming, and qualified to compete in this 30th international Olympiad. Recently over two further weekends they have consolidated their skills by practising problems from past IOI contests going back as far as 2011.
They will compete individually against high schoolers from more than 80 countries worldwide at Tsukuba Science City, Japan’s largest research and development hub, located 50 kilometres North East of Tokyo. Tsukuba hosts more than 20 000 researchers of 130 nationalities.
The team leaders are university students, Robin Visser (Mathematics Honours, University of Stellenbosch) and Laurens Weyn (3rd year Computer Science, UCT). Both are former IOI participants.
Participation in this prestige Olympiad is organised by the SA Computer Olympiad with training and travel costs covered by Standard Bank.
