Tournament of Young Informaticians

A "tournament" is a different animal from an olympiad. Instead of everyone sitting alone with the same problem set and a judge, teams present prepared solutions to each other and then argue: a team proposes a solution, an opposing team is assigned to poke holes in it, and a jury scores both the proof and the defense. It rewards depth and rhetoric as much as raw correctness, which made it feel closer to a research seminar than a contest.

In May 2002, UPML — the Ukrainian Physics and Mathematics Lyceum — sent a team to Chernivtsi for the very first All-Ukrainian Tournament of Young Informaticians, and I was on it. We took 2nd team place at that inaugural edition, a silver finish against a field that was inventing the format as it went. I stayed involved with the tournament after that: by its second edition I was captaining the lyceum's team.