An International Experience
The Baltic Olympiad in Informatics (BOI) is a programming contest for secondary school students from countries around or close to the Baltic sea. About 60 contestants from 10 countries compete against each other, solving difficult problems of algorithmic nature. Each participating country sends 6 contestants from their national olympiads which take place in the months beforehand.
BOI was founded in 1995, starting with three participating countries. Since then, it has grown to include 10 countries: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. In addition, teams from other countries may be invited as guests.
BOI shares its competition format with the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), which is the annual world programming championship for secondary school students. On each of two contest days, the contestants participate in a 5-hour exam. They are given a number of difficult algorithmic problems and are required to solve these by writing programs. Their programs are then evaluated and scored based on both efficiency and correctness. Several BOI countries take BOI results into account when selecting their teams for IOI.