Filipino students brought home the country’s second bronze medal from one of the most prestigious computer science competitions in the world, proving for the second time that our local homegrown students can compete alongside all the other nations.
Robin Yu, competing as a Grade 11 student from Xavier School, won bronze at the recently concluded International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) held in Kazan, Russia. He managed to get a perfect score of 100 for Detecting Molecules (Day 1) and Paint By Number (Day 2). Including the partial scores for both days, he was able to obtain an impressive 257 points for the whole competition. This feat earns him his second bronze medal for the IOI.
Farrell Wu, on the other hand, competed as a Grade 11 student from MGC New Life Christian Academy. He managed to score 190 points for the whole competition.
The younger participants among the four were Maded Batara III, a Grade 10 student from the Philippine Science High School – Main Campus and also a first-timer, and Ian Palabasan, competing as a Grade 9 student from Rizal National Science High School. Both accumulated a total of 72 points each across all the problems given during the competition.
The four students were accompanied by team leader Kevin Atienza and deputy team leader Payton Yao, both prominent local figures in the national competitive programming scene. The students were coached by Kevin Atienza, Payton Yao, and Jared Asuncion.
This is only the second time that a Philippine delegation was sent to represent the country in the International Olympiad in Informatics – and the second time our delegates have reaped awards for our country. This year, a total of 324 participants from 88 countries registered to the Olympiad. Among the countries represented are China, Russia, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Vietnam, the US, Australia and the Philippines.
The students were sponsored by local tech companies 24/7 International, Bitstop Networking Services, Custom Thread, D&L Industries, Inc., Pointwest Technologies Corporation, Smart Communications and Thinking Machines Data Science. The organizing team would also like to thank Tonette Rivera for her help.
The Philippine delegation to the IOI were chosen among the top students who joined the third annual National Olympiad in Informatics – Philippines (NOI.PH 2016). The organizing committee for the NOI.PH is composed mainly of UP graduates. who were once participants and winners of university-level programming contests. They volunteer each year to organize the NOI and IOI so that students can experience the joys of competitive programming at an earlier age. NOI.PH was started by Martin Gomez and Wilson Chua back in 2014, with similar goals.