Chile at IOI 2006

Regarding the news about Chile’s participation in the IOI, here is a message I received from Arturo Cepeda, Chairman of IOI2006, whom I asked about it. The reason I asked was that, in spite of the news story, our country’s team doesn’t show up with any medal in the official medal table.

The reason is clear from Mr. Cepeda’s reply. It isn’t exactly what the El Mercurio piece says, but we should be proud of our team’s participation all the same.

I hope to get in touch with the team, so I can bring you news.

From: Arturo Cepeda Sent: Saturday, September 2, 2006 12:44 To: Eduardo Díaz CC: Alexander Tchobanov Subject: RE: Regarding Chile participation on IOI 2006

Dear Mr. Diaz:

Chile is one of the countries that traditionally takes part in the International Olympiad in Informatics, IOI. This year the event was held in our country, in the beautiful city of Merida, Yucatan, from August 13 to 20. Each country takes part with a delegation of up to 4 contestants and 2 teachers, a Team Leader and a Deputy Leader.

This year Chile took part with Team Leader Professor Alexandre Velkov and Deputy Leader Professor John Pereira. There were only three contestants this year, namely:

Juan Patricio Correa Poblete Simón Andrés González Santander Jose Alberto Herrera González

The main competition is the Olympiad in Informatics, IOI. This year, however, there was an additional competition, optional for the contestants. It was a Robot Programming Tournament, named the Robo-Aluxes, and it consisted of programming a robot handed to each team so as to get through some preliminary trials and a final. The team from Chile competed against 39 others from other countries; on the first day of competition they advanced to the semifinals along with 8 other teams, and on the second day they advanced to the finals against Spain and Lithuania, those being the three finalist teams.

The result of that competition is indeed that the team from Spain took First Place and the Gold Medal in this contest, Chile took Second Place and the Silver Medal, and Third Place and the Bronze Medal went to the team from Lithuania.

The Chilean team was made up of the three young contestants mentioned above and led by the two teachers in charge of this year’s Chilean delegation.

This is a great achievement by the young Chileans, since they compete against the best young programmers in the world and earned an outstanding place in this robot programming contest, which shows the potential Chile has, a potential that should be encouraged and nurtured in order to reach better positions in international competitions.

As for the main competition, Chile did not win any medal, so harder work will be needed in order to reach the Olympic medals in Informatics in the future.

The IOI is an international competition held year after year, and the venues planned for the next 4 years are Croatia 2007, Egypt 2008, Bulgaria 2009 and Canada in 2010, so there is time to prepare Chile’s youth for these contests, in the field that is essential and strategic for every country, namely Informatics.

The results will soon be available on the official IOI 2006 web page. For now the final official results of the competition can be seen at the address Zide Du gave you. The scoring problems concerned the medals in the main competition and affected 7 young people who moved up a category, that is, from nothing to Bronze (3) and from Bronze to Silver (4), but in no case did this affect any Chilean contestant.

I hope this is useful, so that the IOI becomes better known in Chile and young people get more encouragement and support to arrive better prepared at these competitions.

Sincerely, Arturo Cepeda Salinas Chairman IOI 2006.