Please see the announcement from IOI President Greg Lee:
Dear Friends of IOI,
We trust that you are managing well during this difficult period as the world fights the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The IC of the IOI held their 3rd online meeting on 6th June. We have the following important updates to share with the community.
First, IOI 2020, organized by Singapore, will be held online around the end of September 2020. We are in communication with organizers of IMO 2020, which is now moved to an online competition on 21st and 22nd September 2020. The IC, along with the Singapore host organizers, are still working out many details, including technical and execution, concerning this special online IOI 2020. We will keep you updated as more information becomes available.
Secondly, IOI 2021 will be hosted by Singapore onsite, from Sunday, 20th June 2021 to Sunday, 27th June 2021. We are presently in communication with the ICPC Headquarters who have postponed their ICPC World Finals 2020 to Wednesday, 23rd June 2021. We are scheduling our activities so that the actual IOI 2021 contest days, being on Tuesday, 22nd June 2021 and Thursday, 24th June 2021, are not concurrent with the actual ICPC World Finals 2020 contest day on Wednesday, 23rd June 2021. At any rate, there are no students who can qualify for both IOI 2021 and ICPC World Finals 2020. Unfortunately, some IOI committee members and team/deputy leaders may also be involved with ICPC World Finals; we will work together to support the affected individuals.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact the IOI Secretariat at [email protected].
Stay safe and best wishes,
Greg Lee
IOI President
Why are ICPC dates postponed to next year and is not virtual, while not the same is true for IOI? It is very unfair for students who have worked hard
Why do you not postpone it to next year?
Basically there's no way to go to IOI as a coach if you're also taking part in ICPC WF. Congrats IOI and ICPC — you have all the time in the world, scheduling more than a whole year away, and there's still a collision.
Please note that there are a lot of stakeholders and constraints in organizing onsite competitions attended by hundreds if not thousands of people around the world spending millions of dollars. There are much more things to consider when choosing the date for onsite contests compared to for a 5-hour online contest, say an Internet Problem Solving Contest.
Yes, but no collisions is one of those factors, at least between IOI/IMO and IOI/ICPC, and yet it wasn't considered important enough. Taking care that contest days don't overlap is pretty much useless too.
As jonathanirvings's response implies, some of the constraints may involve people resourcing or financial aspect as well, which you can't just magically avoid. I suspect that you do not know all the factors Singaporean side had to consider before deciding that the clash would be unfortunately necessary.
If you find that avoiding clash between IOI/ICPC (which is very unfortunate for some delegation members indeed but at least doesn't affect contestants at all) is the absolute top priority in all circumstances, I have no issues stating that I personally can consider many factors to be much more important than having no clash between IOI/ICPC.
Taking care that contest days don't overlap in this instance is helpful for members involved in both competitions to be able to follow both of them separately. If I'm the coach of both teams and my priority is tending to both teams, even if one of them has to be online; this is absolutely crucial. I believe that in most of the cases it should be possible to find replacements for onsite delegation representatives. In my personal opinion, this causes the biggest problems for Singapore itself, where almost everyone involved in competitive programming would be involved in IOI 2021.
I certainly don't and I'd like to know especially if they actually considered it or just picked a date that seemed good for them and later found out there's a clash. You imply that it's the former case, so you know something more?
The limiting factor is the amount of attention a human can give. You lose out on one or both.
Not only possible, but necessary whenever it matters at all that you're following them. That's what I'd do.
As a member of IOI International Committee I indeed know more, but am very careful with my statements as to not intentionally or accidentally release non-public information. Having said that, I can say the following:
The clash was discovered earlier than any side announced the dates publicly. To the best of my knowledge both sides tried to resolve the clash but were unfortunately unable to do so. For the IOI side, the dates chosen turned out to be the only ones possible due to people and venue constraints. A year of notice with already finalized budget (for IOI 2020 onsite) to organize event of such scale isn't "all the time in the world" and severely restricts available options unfortunately. Please also understand the additional challenges of scheduling under these circumstances – a lot of events get rescheduled at a short notice and at the same time, which is definitely not what usually happens in regular circumstances.
I agree with you. Which is why effort is being made so that affected people do not have to follow two competitions in one day.
All right, that's a good thing at least.
I find collision between ICPC and IOI pretty unimportant. Is it so important for people to be coach at IOI? Will some countries lack competent people to cover both?
For me, IOI coach >> GCJ Finals (IOI 2019 clashed with GCJ 2019 Finals)
I guess countries who usually select active CPers as IOI coach will likely have trouble, although this won't be the case for Poland.
"For me, IOI coach >> GCJ Finals" — LOL WAT o_0!? I guess I will have to accept your opinion, but at the same time it is utterly incomprehensible to me
So you would prefer going to IOI as a coach than going to GCJ Finals as a contestant if you advanced?
In 2019, when I decided to do IOI coach, I knew that it clashes with GCJ Finals. But it turned out that I wasn’t qualified to Finals, so whatever.
Yes, this shouldn't be a problem. In IOI, the most important skill of a team leader is to be able to help contestants in special situations (for example, a contestant gets sick and is taken to hospital). In ICPC, the contestants are adults so the coach doesn't have much to do, and it is even possible to have a team without a coach.
That's more like the organisers' area of competence. Being an adult isn't all that useful if you're in a foreign country you don't know anything about, not to mention contestants are sometimes also adults or old enough to take care of themselves. If you're going to uni in a few months, do you still need an adult?
That clearly depends a lot on where you're from. Since IOI is associated with high school, in many countries, whatever happens with people that are there because or thanks to being enrolled as high school student, will often at least partially affect the leaders (just as, for example in Romania, if something bad happens with a student at school, no matter their age, it's for some reason the school's responsibility). Not saying it makes sense, just that it is as it is (at least in some places). Although I find it fair for leaders to be knowledgeable people, it's pretty common that people with little idea of what the contest involves or that aren't able to formulate an articulate opinion as to why a task is inappropriate or not, end up being leaders. That's not good, but hasn't affected the Olympiad much in the past.
Yeah, it's a responsibility thing. Not a problemsolver thing most of the time.
I also have the feeling that many leaders don't know much about competitive programming. However, the tasks have been prepared before the contest by experts, and almost always the first proposed task set is chosen in the leader meeting, so this is not a big problem.
On the other hand, even if more leaders had competitive programming knowledge, it would be difficult to make decisions about tasks, because the tasks are difficult and there is not much time available. You only see the task statement and some solution ideas, there is no time to try to discover the solution yourself or implement it.
In another announcement today (see below), it was announced that IOI 2020 will happen online from September 13 — 19 with an additional day on September 23.