Introduction

The Olympiad is organized by the Ministry of Education or another appropriate institution of one of the following twelve European countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey. According to the rules accepted by the initiators of BOI, teams of these European countries are invited as regular participants. Moreover, the host country may invite guest participants as well. Enlarging or decreasing the set of the regular BOI countries can only be adopted by consensus.

Goals

BOI aims at motivating secondary school students of East Europe to:

• get more interested in informatics and information technology in general,
• test and prove their competence in solving problems with the help of computers,
• exchange knowledge and experience with other students of similar interest and qualification,
• establish personal contacts with young people of the East European region.

Additionally, BOI may:

• provide training for students participating in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI),
• initiate discussion and co-operation in informatics education for the secondary schools of East European countries.

General Rules

Each team is composed of up to four secondary school students, a team leader and a deputy team leader. Only the costs of travel to and from the place of the competition should be paid by teams; all local expenses are covered by the organizers. Accompanying persons and observers are welcome, but they should pay for their stay. Interested people are advised to contact the local organizers. The official language is English. Students may use their mother tongue. Programming problems will be formulated in English and then translated by the team leaders to the mother tongue of their team. Both versions will be given to the students. Team leaders must be able to speak and write in English, as well as the language of their team. The computers will be based on the PC architecture with selected software packages. Only computers and software with built-in help facilities provided by the organizers may be used in the competition. In particular, the use of any printed materials by the students will be forbidden. The programming language of the contest is C++; the precise version of this language. The compilers and programming environments for the above mentioned programming language will be installed on the contestant’s computers.

Team Composition

Students have to be in secondary school during the year when the contest is held and at most 19 years old.

General Assembly (GA)

The team leaders will be members of the General Assembly.

The selection procedure is the following:

1. The chairman of the Scientific Committee distributes the proposals. Their number equals the number of problems to be solved by the contestants.
2. The GA members may either accept or, in case of a major ambiguity of formulation or other serious reasons, deny the proposals by voting. When and if a proposal is denied, another prepared proposal will be offered to the GA. For such cases, the Scientific Committee should prepare at least two extra proposals for each round. The text of the accepted proposals must not be changed by the GA, except for minor rephrasing that is needed to avoid smaller ambiguities.
3. The selected problems will be translated by the team leaders into the national languages of the teams.

Scientific Committee (SC)

The Scientific Committee consists of a chairman and a number of experts (SC members) from the host country. It becomes active well before the beginning of the Olympiad and has the task of selecting and preparing problem proposals.

The task of the Scientific Committee is to test and evaluate the solutions of the contestants.

Problems, Competition

The competition consists of two rounds in two days. In both rounds the working time is five hours and the contestants will be given one to four problems to solve. Within the first hour the contestants may submit written questions (either in English or in their national language) to the Scientific Committee concerning the formulation and interpretation of the problems. Only questions that can be answered with ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘No comment’ may be accepted. The answers will be produced by the members of the Scientific Committee and approved by the chairman of the SC as soon as possible. No later than the end of the competition time of the round, each contestant should prepare his/her solution for the evaluation, according to regulations issued by the organizers. No special hardware requirement or software packages (e.g. graphic packages) will be needed to solve the problems. Generally, the contents and the form of the BOI tasks are guided by the IOI syllabus. The whole communication between BOI authorities and contestants will be in a written form.

Evaluation

The solutions of each of the contestant will be checked by an evaluator, using previously prepared, but unpublished test data. The evaluation is based on the test data and the responses of the programs only. The contestant may not know the results of evaluation before the end of the competition time of the round, except for some test cases previously announced to be feedback. The final results of the evaluation procedure concludes with the meeting of the Scientific Committee, where the evaluation reports are discussed. Potential disagreements are resolved by voting. Achieving a proper and balanced evaluation is the responsibility of the Scientific Committee. If a team leader does not accept the results of the evaluation, he/she may appeal to the General Assembly. Finally, the president of SC presents the results to the General Assembly to take final decisions.

Results and Prizes

The General Assembly will determine the minimum scores for gold, silver and bronze medals. The proportion of these gold, silver and bronze medals should be approximately 1:2:3. About 50% of the contestants should receive medals. Each contestant will receive a certificate of participation. The medals, certificates and other prizes will be given to the contestants at the official closing ceremony.