Two Western Cape learners were among three South Africans who won Silver Medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) held in Mexico from 13 to 20 August 2006.

The three are members of a team of four who were selected from 15 000 participants in last year’s Standard Bank Computer Olympiad.

The Computer Society of South Africa says in a statement that the IOI is an annual competition for young computer programmers. It is held in a different country every year. This year 284 participants from 72 countries took part.

The competition itself takes place over two days. On each of the competition days, the participants receive three problems.

They have five hours to write the computer programs to solve these problems. After 5 hours the evaluators use data sets of increasing complexity to check if the program can provide the correct answers in the allocated time – often less than half a second.

The three Silver Medal winners are:

• Ralf Kistner, the 2005 Standard Bank Trophy winner for the highest mark in the South African Computer Olympiad – when he was still in Grade 11. Ralf is currently in Grade 12 at Paul Roos Gymnasium in Stellenbosch.

• Keegan Carruthers-Smith, who was a participant in IOI 2005 while he was a Grade 12 Learner at Pinelands High. He is currently a first year student at the University of Cape Town.

• Joshua Yudaken was one of the top students in the Standard Bank Computer Olympiad while he was still in Grade 11. He is currently in Grade 12 at King David School, Linksfield, Johannesburg.

Max Rabkin, the fourth member of the team, narrowly missed getting a medal too. Max was in Grade 11 at Cedar House School when he won his place in the team. He is now studying Computer Science at the University of Cape Town.

Peter Waker, Vice President (Education & Training) of the CSSA comments:

"This is the best result we have had since 2001".

"It is amazing that a small player like South Africa can do so well in a competition with the rest of the world. The USA, Russia, China, Poland and Korea walk off with most medals, but three silver medals for our chaps; that is an amazing achievement."

Inquiries:
  Peter Waker
  Manager: Standard Bank/CSSA Computer Olympiad
  Email: info@olympiad.org.za
  Tel: 021-448-7864
  Fax: 021-447-8410