This is a somewhat modified version of the notes I had prepared for a lecture on inequalities that formed part of a training camp organized by the Association of Mathematics Teachers of India for preparation for the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad (INMO) for students from Tamil Nadu. 1. Basic idea of inequalities 1.1. What we need to prove. An “inequation” is an expression of the form: F ...

This paper explores the association of shallow and selective global tree search with Monte Carlo in 9x9 go. This exploration is based on Olga and Indigo, two experimental Monte Carlo programs. We provide a min-max algorithm that iteratively deepens the tree until one move at the root is proved to be superior to the other ones. At each iteration, random games are started at leaf nodes to compute...

The Lithuanian Informatics Olympiad is a problem solving contest for high school students. The work of each contestant is evaluated in terms of several criteria, where each criterion is measured according to its own scale (but the same scale for each contestant). Several jury members are involved in the evaluation. This paper analyses the problem how to calculate the aggregated score for whole ...

Computing competitions like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) typically pose several problems that contestants are required to solve by writing a program. The program is tested automatically on several sets of input data to determine whether or not it computes the correct answer within specified time and memory limits. We consider the controversy of whether and how to award partia...

Connect-6 is a newly invented game [1], which is also a part of the computer olympiad. In this article we present our initial design of the Connect-6 player on FPGA. We used High Level Synthesis tools to convert existing open source C code to hardware. The preliminary unconstrained synthesis with SynphonyCC(SCC) generates hardware which occupies 70% of the Cyclone II FPGA, runs at a clock frequ...

We discuss CUECARD, the program that won the 2008 Computer Olympiad computational pool tournament. Beside addressing intrinsic interest in a complex competitive environment with unique features, our goal is to isolate the factors that contributed to the performance so that the lessons can be transferred to other, similar domains. Specifically, we distinguish among pure engineering factors (such...

Players of complex board games like backgammon, chess and go, were always wondering what the best opening moves for their favourite game are. In the last decade, computer analysis has offered more insight to many opening variations. This is especially true for backgammon, where computer rollouts have radically changed the way human experts play the opening. In this paper we use Palamedes, the w...

The game of Hex is a beautiful and mind-challenging game with simple rules and a strategic complexity comparable to that of Chess and Go. Hex positions do not tend to decompose into sums of independent positions. Nevertheless, we demonstrate how to reduce evaluation of Hex positions to topological analysis of a hierarchy of simpler positions, and we develop corresponding recursive calculus. We ...