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52-754: The United States of America Computing Olympiad ( USACO ) is an online computer programming competition, which serves as qualification for the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) in the United States of America . Primarily for secondary school students in the United States , the USACO offers four competitions (December, January, February, US Open) during the academic year. Participants compete in four increasingly difficult divisions (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum), each of which

104-402: A compiler can make it crash when parsing some large source file, a simplification of the test case that results in only few lines from the original source file can be sufficient to reproduce the same crash. Trial-and-error/divide-and-conquer is needed: the programmer will try to remove some parts of the original test case and check if the problem still exists. When debugging the problem in a GUI,

156-651: A few lectures on different areas of computer science and programming. At the conclusion of the camp, there is an ice cream party recognizing the participants, in particular those who are selected for the delegation to the IOI. Since 2022, top-scoring female contestants have been additionally invited to the USACO training camp to select four students for the USA team at the European Girls' Olympiad in Informatics . Computer programming Computer programming or coding

208-540: A few simple readability transformations made code shorter and drastically reduced the time to understand it. Following a consistent programming style often helps readability. However, readability is more than just programming style. Many factors, having little or nothing to do with the ability of the computer to efficiently compile and execute the code, contribute to readability. Some of these factors include: The presentation aspects of this (such as indents, line breaks, color highlighting, and so on) are often handled by

260-470: A result, loses efficiency and the ability for low-level manipulation). Debugging is a very important task in the software development process since having defects in a program can have significant consequences for its users. Some languages are more prone to some kinds of faults because their specification does not require compilers to perform as much checking as other languages. Use of a static code analysis tool can help detect some possible problems. Normally

312-441: A secret computer library, which allows problems where the input is not fixed, but depends on the program's actions – for example in game problems (a.k.a interactive problems). Another type of problem has the inputs publicly available, for these, the contestants have to submit an output file instead of a program, and it is up to them whether they obtain the output files by writing a program (possibly exploiting special characteristics of

364-484: A task the contestant has to write a computer program (in C++ ) and submit it before the five-hour competition time ends. The program is graded based on secret test data. Since IOI 2010, tasks are divided into subtasks with graduated difficulty, and points are awarded only when all tests for a particular subtask yield correct results, within specific time and memory limits. In some cases, the contestant's program has to interact with

416-471: A time span of three to five hours. These competitions are unproctored but are monitored strictly, and users caught attempting to cheat are banned for life. In addition to testing solutions based on correctness of answers, additional restrictions include run time and memory usage . Historically, scores were computed based on number of correct answers, with weighted values; harder problems and test cases were given more weight than easier ones. In recent years,

468-459: A visual environment. Different programming languages support different styles of programming (called programming paradigms ). The choice of language used is subject to many considerations, such as company policy, suitability to task, availability of third-party packages, or individual preference. Ideally, the programming language best suited for the task at hand will be selected. Trade-offs from this ideal involve finding enough programmers who know

520-472: A week-long summer training camp is held in late May-early June (with around 24-30 top USACO participants invited as USACO "Finalists"). Four students are selected from a group of finalists to represent the United States of America (USA) at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Beginning in the 2020–21 season, top female participants are also invited to the camp to select the team to represent

572-410: Is Entity-Relationship Modeling ( ER Modeling ). Implementation techniques include imperative languages ( object-oriented or procedural ), functional languages , and logic programming languages. It is very difficult to determine what are the most popular modern programming languages. Methods of measuring programming language popularity include: counting the number of job advertisements that mention

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624-459: Is a five-hour competition consisting of three questions. The US Open has not been proctored since 2009 (it was proctored prior to that). Like the internet competitions, the US Open is divided based on divisions, from Bronze to Platinum, and is also held online. The US Open is generally more difficult than the normal Internet competitions, but is scored in the same manner. Performance in the US Open

676-607: Is directly executed by the central processing unit . Proficient programming usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain , details of programming languages and generic code libraries , specialized algorithms, and formal logic . Auxiliary tasks accompanying and related to programming include analyzing requirements , testing , debugging (investigating and fixing problems), implementation of build systems , and management of derived artifacts , such as programs' machine code . While these are sometimes considered programming, often

728-464: Is little more than a different notation for a machine language, two machines with different instruction sets also have different assembly languages. High-level languages made the process of developing a program simpler and more understandable, and less bound to the underlying hardware . The first compiler related tool, the A-0 System , was developed in 1952 by Grace Hopper , who also coined

780-451: Is one of the key elements in determining the invites to the USACO training camp, although a solid performance in the other internet competitions also plays a major role. The USACO training camp is a month-long program held to determine which four students will comprise the USA team at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Around 24 people are invited to the project, which is usually held in late May or early June. The training camp

832-452: Is provided a distinct set of 3 solvable competitive programming problems during each contest. Coding & submitting computer programs can be done in one of four languages: C , C++ , Java , and Python . Competitors begin in the Bronze division, and advance through the levels by performing well in their current division. Following the US Open (ran in late March to early April) competition,

884-652: Is similar to learning a foreign language . International Olympiad in Informatics Each country sends a team of up to four students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and guests. Students in each country are selected for their country's team through national computing contests . Students at the IOI compete on an individual basis. There is no official team ranking. The contest consists of two days of solving six complicated algorithmic tasks by writing computer programs in C++ . All task materials are published on each year's contest website soon after

936-542: Is still strong in corporate data centers often on large mainframe computers , Fortran in engineering applications, scripting languages in Web development, and C in embedded software . Many applications use a mix of several languages in their construction and use. New languages are generally designed around the syntax of a prior language with new functionality added, (for example C++ adds object-orientation to C, and Java adds memory management and bytecode to C++, but as

988-401: Is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs , that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms , step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages . Programmers typically use high-level programming languages that are more easily intelligible to humans than machine code , which

1040-434: Is usually easier to code in "high-level" languages than in "low-level" ones. Programming languages are essential for software development. They are the building blocks for all software, from the simplest applications to the most sophisticated ones. Allen Downey , in his book How To Think Like A Computer Scientist , writes: Many computer languages provide a mechanism to call functions provided by shared libraries . Provided

1092-504: The Jacquard loom could produce entirely different weaves by changing the "program" – a series of pasteboard cards with holes punched in them. Code-breaking algorithms have also existed for centuries. In the 9th century, the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi described a cryptographic algorithm for deciphering encrypted code, in A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages . He gave

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1144-439: The source code editor , but the content aspects reflect the programmer's talent and skills. Various visual programming languages have also been developed with the intent to resolve readability concerns by adopting non-traditional approaches to code structure and display. Integrated development environments (IDEs) aim to integrate all such help. Techniques like Code refactoring can enhance readability. The academic field and

1196-568: The 9th century, a programmable music sequencer was invented by the Persian Banu Musa brothers, who described an automated mechanical flute player in the Book of Ingenious Devices . In 1206, the Arab engineer Al-Jazari invented a programmable drum machine where a musical mechanical automaton could be made to play different rhythms and drum patterns, via pegs and cams . In 1801,

1248-526: The AE in 1837. In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith invented the concept of storing data in machine-readable form. Later a control panel (plug board) added to his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to be programmed for different jobs, and by the late 1940s, unit record equipment such as the IBM 602 and IBM 604 , were programmed by control panels in a similar way, as were the first electronic computers . However, with

1300-496: The Contest Management System (CMS) for developing and monitoring the contest. The scores from the two competition days and all problems are summed up separately for each contestant. Medals are awarded depending on their relative total score. The top 50% of the contestants are awarded medals, such that the relative number of gold : silver : bronze : no medal is approximately 1:2:3:6 (thus 1/12 of

1352-537: The IOI 2020 and IOI 2021, originally scheduled to be hosted by Singapore , were held as online contests. The IOI 2022, hosted by Indonesia , was held as a hybrid event, with around 25% of the contestants participating online. In response to the invasion of Ukraine, students from Russia and Belarus can only participate as individuals under the IOI flag but not as national delegations starting from IOI 2022, and they would only participate online for IOI 2022, but they may return on-site from IOI 2023 onwards. In response to

1404-668: The USACO Training Pages, a new resource rising in popularity is the USACO Guide, a subproject of the Competitive Programming Initiative run by USACO competitors who have done well in past USACO competitions. It is a collection of the concepts covered by USACO to help new participants perform better in the competition. There are four Internet competitions held each year, each of which consists of three or four problems to be completed in

1456-858: The United States at the European Girls Olympiad in Informatics (EGOI). All expenses are paid for at the training camp and the competition at IOI. The USACO was founded in 1992 by Don Piele at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside , and is currently maintained by director Brian Dean at Clemson University and a dedicated volunteer coaching staff. The USACO contains several training pages on its website which are designed to develop one's skills in programming solutions to difficult and varied algorithmic problems at one's own pace. In addition to around 100 problems, there are texts on programming techniques such as greedy algorithms , dynamic programming , shortest path , among others. In addition to

1508-414: The circumstances. The first step in most formal software development processes is requirements analysis , followed by testing to determine value modeling, implementation, and failure elimination (debugging). There exist a lot of different approaches for each of those tasks. One approach popular for requirements analysis is Use Case analysis. Many programmers use forms of Agile software development where

1560-495: The code, making it easy to target varying machine instruction sets via compilation declarations and heuristics . Compilers harnessed the power of computers to make programming easier by allowing programmers to specify calculations by entering a formula using infix notation . Programs were mostly entered using punched cards or paper tape . By the late 1960s, data storage devices and computer terminals became inexpensive enough that programs could be created by typing directly into

1612-407: The competition ends. On each of the two competition days, the competitors are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works on their own to solve the problems with no outside help, specifically no communication with other contestants, books, web access, etc. Contestants are typically allowed to bring no programable wired keyboards and mice. Usually to solve

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1664-467: The computers. Text editors were also developed that allowed changes and corrections to be made much more easily than with punched cards . Whatever the approach to development may be, the final program must satisfy some fundamental properties. The following properties are among the most important: Using automated tests and fitness functions can help to maintain some of the aforementioned attributes. In computer programming, readability refers to

1716-548: The concept of the stored-program computer introduced in 1949, both programs and data were stored and manipulated in the same way in computer memory . Machine code was the language of early programs, written in the instruction set of the particular machine, often in binary notation. Assembly languages were soon developed that let the programmer specify instructions in a text format (e.g., ADD X, TOTAL), with abbreviations for each operation code and meaningful names for specifying addresses. However, because an assembly language

1768-602: The conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, students from Israel can only participate as individuals under the IOI flag but not as a national delegation from IOI 2025 onwards. Over two thirds of the delegations voted in favour of the sanction in the IOI General Assembly. The following is a list of the top performers in the history of the IOI. The sign indicates a perfect score, a rare achievement in IOI history. The sign indicates an unofficial participation, where

1820-557: The contestants get a gold medal). Prior to IOI 2010, students who did not receive medals did not have their scores published, although the scores of students who did not receive medals are still not available in the official results, they are known from the live web scoreboard. In IOI 2012 the top 3 nations ranked by aggregate score (Russia, China and USA) were subsequently awarded during the closing ceremony. Analysis of female performance shows 77.9% of women obtain no medal, while 49.2% of men obtain no medal. "The average female participation

1872-510: The ease with which a human reader can comprehend the purpose, control flow , and operation of source code . It affects the aspects of quality above, including portability, usability and most importantly maintainability. Readability is important because programmers spend the majority of their time reading, trying to understand, reusing, and modifying existing source code, rather than writing new source code. Unreadable code often leads to bugs, inefficiencies, and duplicated code . A study found that

1924-527: The engineering practice of computer programming are concerned with discovering and implementing the most efficient algorithms for a given class of problems. For this purpose, algorithms are classified into orders using Big O notation , which expresses resource use—such as execution time or memory consumption—in terms of the size of an input. Expert programmers are familiar with a variety of well-established algorithms and their respective complexities and use this knowledge to choose algorithms that are best suited to

1976-400: The first description of cryptanalysis by frequency analysis , the earliest code-breaking algorithm. The first computer program is generally dated to 1843 when mathematician Ada Lovelace published an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers , intended to be carried out by Charles Babbage 's Analytical Engine . However, Charles Babbage himself had written a program for

2028-404: The first step in debugging is to attempt to reproduce the problem. This can be a non-trivial task, for example as with parallel processes or some unusual software bugs. Also, specific user environment and usage history can make it difficult to reproduce the problem. After the bug is reproduced, the input of the program may need to be simplified to make it easier to debug. For example, when a bug in

2080-464: The functions in a library follow the appropriate run-time conventions (e.g., method of passing arguments ), then these functions may be written in any other language. Computer programmers are those who write computer software. Their jobs usually involve: Although programming has been presented in the media as a somewhat mathematical subject, some research shows that good programmers have strong skills in natural human languages, and that learning to code

2132-459: The input), or by hand, or by a combination of these means. Pascal has been removed as an available programming language as of 2019. IOI 2010 for the first time had a live web scoreboard with real-time provisional results. Submissions will be scored as soon as possible during the contest, and the results posted. Contestants will be aware of their scores, but not others', and may resubmit to improve their scores. Starting from 2012, IOI has been using

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2184-404: The language to build a team, the availability of compilers for that language, and the efficiency with which programs written in a given language execute. Languages form an approximate spectrum from "low-level" to "high-level"; "low-level" languages are typically more machine-oriented and faster to execute, whereas "high-level" languages are more abstract and easier to use but execute less quickly. It

2236-465: The language, the number of books sold and courses teaching the language (this overestimates the importance of newer languages), and estimates of the number of existing lines of code written in the language (this underestimates the number of users of business languages such as COBOL). Some languages are very popular for particular kinds of applications, while some languages are regularly used to write many different kinds of applications. For example, COBOL

2288-476: The programmer can try to skip some user interaction from the original problem description and check if the remaining actions are sufficient for bugs to appear. Scripting and breakpointing are also part of this process. Debugging is often done with IDEs . Standalone debuggers like GDB are also used, and these often provide less of a visual environment, usually using a command line . Some text editors such as Emacs allow GDB to be invoked through them, to provide

2340-449: The scoring model has shifted to an unweighted system, in which every problem and every test case is accorded equal value. Overall, these contests are designed to be very hard, and as such have a low average score compared to other programming competitions. In addition to the three normal internet competitions, a fourth competition, the US Open, is held annually in early April. The competition is touted as 'the USACO's flagship tournament' and

2392-560: The solution." The European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics ( EGOI ), which was first held in 2021 was started with the goal to increscent female participants at IOI and other Informatics Olympiads. In IOI 2017 held in Iran, due to not being able to participate in Iran, the Israeli students participated in an offsite competition organized by IOI in Russia. Due to visa issues, the full USA team

2444-411: The term software development is used for this larger overall process – with the terms programming , implementation , and coding reserved for the writing and editing of code per se. Sometimes software development is known as software engineering , especially when it employs formal methods or follows an engineering design process . Programmable devices have existed for centuries. As early as

2496-409: The term 'compiler'. FORTRAN , the first widely used high-level language to have a functional implementation, came out in 1957, and many other languages were soon developed—in particular, COBOL aimed at commercial data processing, and Lisp for computer research. These compiled languages allow the programmer to write programs in terms that are syntactically richer, and more capable of abstracting

2548-560: The various stages of formal software development are more integrated together into short cycles that take a few weeks rather than years. There are many approaches to the Software development process. Popular modeling techniques include Object-Oriented Analysis and Design ( OOAD ) and Model-Driven Architecture ( MDA ). The Unified Modeling Language ( UML ) is a notation used for both the OOAD and MDA. A similar technique used for database design

2600-414: Was 4.4% in 1989–1994 and 2.2% in 1996–2014." It also suggests much higher participation of women on the national level, claiming sometimes double-digit percentages in total participation on the first stage. President of the IOI (2011-2014), Richard Forster, says the competition has difficulty attracting women and that in spite of trying to solve it, "none of us have hit on quite what the problem is, let alone

2652-517: Was held at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside for many years, then Colorado College from 2005 to 2007, and then moved to Clemson University in 2010. To qualify, one must be a secondary school student in the U.S. and have scored highly on the Internet contests and/or the US Open. At the camp, contests are held in the morning, followed by discussion of solutions. In the afternoon, the students engage in various recreational activities. There are also

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2704-641: Was unable to attend, although one contestant Zhezheng Luo was able to attend by traveling with the Chinese team and winning gold medal and 3rd place in standings. In IOI 2019 held in Azerbaijan, the Armenia team did not participate due to the dispute between the two countries , despite the guarantees provided and official invitation letter sent by the host Azerbaijan. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic , both

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