I would refrain from mentioning any specific examples because this isn't the point of this blog.
Let's consider this situation, Alice and Bob want to study for an exam. Alice will study on his own, may use the internet to look for resources if there's any. On the other side, Bob will be taught and guided by the world's best teacher who has 50+ years of experience and he is the one who will be writing the exam. Both, Alice and Bob, will do their hardest and study for the exam, but could we say that this situation is fair for Alice? Bob has essentially worked hard, but Alice did too, he just didn't have the resources and the personalized guidance that Bob got.
Many countries spend thousands on IOI camps (and on Olympiads in general). That forced the gap between poor and rich countries. Of course, you have countries that rely on talented students and don't care to train them. However, some care more about their students and do more camps and invest in their students. The point is, a country's performance seems to be a function with just two parameters, wealth (with a wise hand) and population size, with a minor random constant. This makes me sometimes feel that IOI isn't fair. Many students would like to have the potential and would work their hardest to achieve their goals, but sadly they don't have what other guys have.
Thankfully, many initiatives are trying to limit this problem, but the problem will persist. What can be done? What do you think about this issue? Did IOI become a pay-to-win game in the countries' level?
Disabled people are also disadvantaged in IOI. IOI isn't unfair, life is. All you can do is just do your best. Also i don't think that a country's wealth is all that important, many of the best countries are not very wealthy, and lots of rich countries are not in the top places.
It was more about people who are not disabled and have the potential but leaking guidance. I understand that this is life, but what can we do? what can IOI (and other Olympiads) do to help those?
I wanted to point out that many people are disadvantaged in one way or another, and without implementing some sort of system in IOI in which you get points for being disadvantaged (which is in my opinion bad) there is no way of equalizing everything.
Yes, indeed. There isn't a perfect system.
I should have mentioned this in the blog, but anyway. Look to Khan Academy and their efforts to equalize the baseline for students taking the SAT. I understand that IOI is much different than SAT, but a similar thing could be done. What do you think about it?
Could you give a link to that? I don't really know much about that and can't find it on the web.
Well, for your information, I, a former Khan Academy user, spent an average of 4 hours of practice per day for 3 months on this platform to get 1400 on the SAT. I still need to spend money on additional training resources to get a near-perfect score on this standardized test.
(For those who know nothing about the SAT, about 4% of all SAT test-takers scored 1400 or above. Meanwhile, on Codeforces, $$$4$$$% of users scored 2000 rating points or above)
Therefore, I think competitive programming platforms that have similar quality with Khan Academy are already available.
They don't offer a clear guide tho. Codeforces gives you problems to practice, some of them are out of the IOI syllabus. There is no such a (free service) for IOI as there is Khan Academy to SAT.
Khan Academy also did not offer me a clear guide for the SAT.
This was how Khan Academy worked when I trained for the SAT:
There were some training videos, but the content of these videos was just someone presents a sample question, the answer to that question, and a detailed explanation.
In the math section, I remember that some topics presented in Khan Academy were actually out of the scope of the SAT (since these topics were taken from Khan Academy's math curriculum).
I think you can use the "problem tag" features of Codeforces to simulate the above process.
I think there's a misconception in a lot of beginners in CP that you need a clear "guide".
HackerRank was useful for me as a beginner as it had sections for different topics such as "Greedy" and "Dynamic Programming".
After that, you just do problems, see what problems you couldn't solve, and make sure you can solve similar ones next time.
Even if you wanted to learn a specific topic, it's easy with a simple google search. For example, searching "centroid decomposition problems" gives https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/61153.
I think that people could be blaming their lack of improvement on not having a "clear guide", when the true reason could be something else such as lack of practice.
https://stats.ioinformatics.org/countries/?sort=medals_desc
The top three seem to agree with this hypothesis, but there are countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia in top 10, which I wouldn't associate with either rich or large.
But all of them pays a considerable amount of money to camps/training with an already big society that is eager to helping them. Wealth was an unclear word to say, it's more like, money spent on the olympiad rather than wealth itself.
According to this article
The last sentence of this paragraph shows that money spent on training is not a deciding factor in Romanian success in the IOI.
I think wealth doesn't help in terms of the training camps and coaches, but students in wealthier countries come across programming more often and much earlier.
You can't deny that coaching helps a lot of people out there, and I suppose author is in some sense right. It's not about wealthiness of a country, but investment into the olympiads.
When people become reliant on coaching then they are afraid to learn new things on their own using the vast amount of available internet resources.
Edit: In response to 2nd comment below, some people do become reliant, but not all.
Can not agree on this. For example I had a lot of coaching, but still use internet to get to know something new. You need coaching on the early stages and later you learn how to learn.
"Bob will be taught and guided by the world's best teacher who has 50+ years of experience and he is the one who will be writing the exam"
Er what does this have to do with IOI? (In the USA this may be true of some other national olympiads, but not informatics?)
"he just didn't have the resources and the personalized guidance that Bob got"
I never received "personalized guidance" so idk if this is actually a significant factor. Of course, that isn't to say that coaches/training camp don't matter (the problems that are used certainly do).
"They don't offer a clear guide tho."
I've compiled plenty of useful information here, but how clear of a guide do you want? Although there's a lot that could be added, I don't think it's necessary to say, determine the single best order in which USACO or IOI problems should be done.