IOAI 2026

IOAI 2026 was a punishing break for contestants expecting something like IOAI 2025. Every task was genuinely hammer resistant (unable to be solved with off-the-shelf methods), as the IOAI Call for Tasks puts it: every Day 1 task shifted sharply from its at-home counterpart, while Day 2 offered no universal source of points. Most leading contestants combined strong scores on two tasks with at least 25 points on another two or three. This problem-specific style will probably define future editions.

1. T1 · Find the OrderAlready entirely different from the at-home task. Many high scorers found an exploitable property of the metric and implemented a trivial solution instead of using the provided model.
2. T2 · Robot ChasingThe closest to its at-home counterpart and the easiest direction to anticipate, although it demanded substantial manual preprocessing before the model could be used.
3. T3 · PotatoA challenging, non-trivial transformation of the at-home task.
4. T4 · Double Agent DilemmaPerhaps the clearest textbook example of its underlying method, though the implementation could still be difficult.
5. T5 · Ghost of MachineHarder than it first appeared to many contestants: unlike Task 1, many attempts that avoided the provided model failed badly.
6. T6 · IOAI FieldOne of the most gamified tasks. Extremely simple solutions could earn solid middle-range scores, but very few contestants scored highly.

(Sasuke Kondo · 11 August 2026)