(UK) INFORMATICS OLYMPIAD FINALISTS
Two Concord students are among only 15 students across the UK to be invited to compete in the British Informatics Olympiad (BIO) 2025 final.
Hanks in 6.2 and Xingzhi in 6.1 both scored highly in the competition’s first round and were delighted to be in the top 15 students in the UK. Those top 15 have been invited to compete in the final, which will be held in Cambridge during the Easter holiday.
The first round was a three-hour paper with three questions and competitors had to solve the questions by creating a computer program is any programming language.
The final in Cambridge will require students to solve a series of written and programming problems using C/C++.
The top 4 students from the final will be chosen as the UK team for the International Informatics Olympiad, which this year is in Bolivia.
For Hanks, this is the fourth time he has reached the BIO final. Last year he went on to represent the UK in the International Informatics Olympiad in Egypt when he gained a silver medal. He is looking forward to the final this year. He has also reached the final of the British Algorithmic Olympiad.
Xingzhi is also delighted to be a finalist “I am extremely excited about qualifying to the BIO final and competing for a spot in the UK national team, which sounded quite improbable to me one or two years ago. The only thought in my mind now is to endeavour to improve my problem-solving skills for the BIO final.”
A love of solving problems is the key for both students in their success.
Hanks explained his enjoyment of different types of questions “my favourite type of problems are ad-hoc problems, referring to problems that are non-standard and miscellaneous that do not belong to any category of Informatics Olympiad (other categories include: dynamic programming problems, data structure problems, and graph problems).”
For Xingzhi dynamic programming questions are his favourite “I enjoy toggling electronic devices and creating my own mini programs in my own time, but they are a completely different realm compared to solving questions in Informatics Olympiads. The type of questions that I enjoy the most in Informatics Olympiads are those called dynamic programming questions, which is one of the most tested topics in Informatics Olympiads. They often resemble a strong link to Combinatorics Maths Olympiads, where I need to derive a recursive formula between different terms of the sequence to calculate the required term. The difference is that, in Maths Olympiads, they might be asking you for the tenth term, whilst it is probably the ten thousandth term that is being asked in Informatics!”
