USA Team Scores Gold Rob Kolstad The USA Computing Olympiad team earned one gold, one silver, and one bronze medals at the recent International Olympiad on Informatics (IOI) held in Cape Town, South Africa, November 30-December 9, 1997. Fifteen-year old whiz kid Matthew Craighead, high-school senior from Mendota Heights, Minnesota scored a gold medal in his second trip to the international championships. Dan Adkins, MIT freshman and three trip veteran, earned a silver. Russell Cox, Harvard freshman and two trip veteran, won a bronze medal. Barely missing a bronze (nine points out of 600) was Benjamin Matthews, Dallas, Texas sophomore in his first international competition. Coaches Don Piele (University of Wisconsin/Parkside professor), Rob Kolstad (BSDI president), and Hal Burch (CMU graduate student) accompanied the team to South Africa. Non-competition events included a visit to an ostrich ranch, a trip to the top of beautiful Table Mountain, an excursion to World of Birds, and a drive to the stormy Cape of Good Hope, where two oceans meet. This year's competition sported problems different than most. Instead of problems begging for clever, well-programmed searching solutions, some of this year's IOI problems had more of an artificial-intelligence flavor. Scoring was based on a rating of the solution based on a `very good' solution rather than a perfect solution. This did cause a bit of trouble for some of the contestants! The 1997-1998 USA Computing Olympiad is well underway with three more contests scheduled over the next five months. Join the hs-computing@delos.com mailing list for complete info or see www.usaco.org.