The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is one of the five international science olympiads and the premier global competitive programming competition for pre-university students. National teams of up to four contestants solve challenging algorithmic and computational problems over two competition days. Medals are awarded to roughly the top half of contestants: gold (top ~1/12), silver (next ~2/12), and bronze (next ~3/12).
Participation is free and entry is exclusively through national selection. Students qualify by excelling in their country's national informatics olympiad — for example, USACO in the United States or BOI for Balkan countries. The IOI rotates host countries annually; the 2026 edition takes place August 9–16 in Uzbekistan. A statistics database, task archive, and getting-started guide are available at ioinformatics.org.