Minutes: International Scientific Committee Meeting 7 Time/Date: 22:45 -- 23:45, 23 August 2002 Place: Kyung-Hee University Library Building, Yong-In, Korea Status: Confirmed (August 2002, January 2003) Present (alphabetical order): Kyung-Yong Chwa Host n Greg Galperin Host n+1 Michalis Hatzopoulos Host n+2 (new member after IOI'02) Ian Munro Elected Jyrki Nummenmaa Host n-1 (leaving member) Kunsoo Park Host n (leaving member; left after item 4) Djura Paunic Elected Tom Verhoeff Re-Elected (chair) Absent: Hal Burch Host n+1 (new member after IOI'02) 1. The meeting is opened by Tom Verhoeff. 2. The proposed agenda is approved unchanged. 3. Kyung-Yong proposes to change chair, and asks whether Ian could do it. Ian does not think he can find the extra time, and reminds us that it will be his last year, so that the chair may have to change again next year. Tom makes it clear that he has no specific interest in chairing the committee. After some further discussion, it is agreed that Tom continues to chair the ISC. It is always possible to reconsider the chair position. 4. Tom thanks the leaving members, Kunsoo Park and Jyrki Nummenmaa, on behalf of everyone for their invaluable contributions to the committee, and especially for their involvement in the preparation and execution of the IOI2002 competition. Jyrki has been on the committee since it was established at IOI'99, and he has always played an active role. Jyrki expresses that he believes the committee has been important in the development of the IOI, and that it should continue to do its work. Kunsoo thanks everyone for helping him and his team develop the IOI'02 competition software. He emphasizes that it was more work than he had expected. His team had to work very hard all the way to the end of IOI'02. He was also very happy with the way their software performed. Michalis (Mike) Hatzopoulos will be on the ISC representing the IOI2004 Host (Greece). It is not yet known whether he will chair the IOI2004 Host Scientific Committee. If someone else will fulfill that position, then that person will replace Mike on the ISC. Mike says this will be known by the end of December 2002. The second ISC member for the IOI2002 Host (USA) is Hal Burch. He briefly served on the ISC after IOI2001, until Greg replaced him. Hal could not attend IOI2002. He will chair the tasks subcommittee for IOI2003. 5. Tom briefly reminds those present about the need for confidentiality. Confidential communications need to be encrypted. For that purpose, the ISC uses PGP. Public PGP keys of members are available on the web. Those new to the committee are requested to provide a public PGP key. For some ISC members there may occasionally arise a conflict of interest, when they are also involved in the organization of a national or regional olympiad. It would be best to refrain from such involvement, but we also understand that in some countries or regions, there may not always be a good alternative available. We trust that all ISC members understand their position in this respect, and that they will know how to handle delicate situations properly. 6. Concerning the IOI2002 competition, which was just completed, we briefly discussed the following items. One externally contributed task was used: UTOPIA. The process of obtaining external tasks suffered this year from some miscommunication. We will try to improve on this again. The practice session was appreciated by the participants, and also served to fine-tune the software and the communication paths between the various competition officials. The Host SC conducted a survey among the participating delegations. It resembles last year's survey and is intended to get feedback on, among other things, the quality of the compilers (GCC, FreePascal) and development environments (Linux, Windows, IDEs, etc.). The results are not yet available. A new kind of task was used at IOI2002: XOR. It was a technically hard task, graded by relative scoring. The objective of the task was to construct a minimal representation of the input. The Host SC did not have a provably-correct minimization algorithm. They only had an approximation algorithm that provably gets within twice the actual minimum, and some further heuristic algorithms. It is even not known what the complexity of the problems is; it is suspected to be NP-complete. Competitors only had to submit the output files for 10 given input files. Submissions for the same case were compared on the basis of the size of the representation (provided that the representation was correct). The competitors with the smallest representation obtained 10 points, and those with larger representations got fewer points on the basis of a formula that was included in the task description. Kyung-Yong pointed out that he had a personal interest in the task XOR and that it offered the competitors a real challenge from the current world of computer science. Ian emphasizes that he likes the idea, but that it is not a kind of task about which to think lightly. He would not want more than one such task in an IOI competition. One difficulty is how to grade submissions for such tasks. The relative scoring was liked by some and not by others. The survey mentioned above also asks about this. The details of relative scoring cannot be decided in a general way; it must be based on the details of the task involved. Jyrki compares it to figure skating, which also has judging complications. The web-based competition services (submit, print, backup/restore, test run) worked very well. It was a system newly developed for IOI2002. Kunsoo promised to make it available for use by the IOI community, although the copyright would remain with him. Again, the survey will provide further feedback on what the participants thought about this new system. The procedure for presenting tasks to the GA and getting them approved was a slightly polished version of last year's procedure. This year the presentation and approval went surprisingly smoothly. However, there is still too much controversy about the distinction between major objections versus minor remarks. The ISC will have to look into this. The grading handouts (with background information on the tasks and the test cases used for grading) were developed rather late. The grading reports (with scoring details of competitors) were delayed. [Please remind me of the reason, I cannot find this in my notes. TV] A publication with more details about the tasks, including complete source code listings of solutions was made available at the closing ceremony. A further analysis will be done later. 7. Concerning the preparations for IOI2003 (USA), the following remarks were made. Communication between the Host SC and the GA is very important, but also difficult. Greg wishes to pay extra attention to this next year. Another key item is the cooperation between Host SC and ISC. Kyung-Yong points out that it should be a goal to do much less work on tasks at the IOI itself. Jyrki points out that each Host SC has different needs. Some have difficulties with formulating tasks in English, another Host SC may need help creating tasks. It is also the ISC's duty to figure out what the capabilities of a Host are, and not to trust their own judgment immediately. Jyrki also emphasized that the software infrastructure (compilers, OS configuration, contest web-services, etc.) needs more attention. The ISC has not really been involved very much in this. It should not be necessary for a Host to reinvent solutions every year. The notion of an IOI Software Team was established to help in these matters, but it never got off the ground properly. The ISC should help identify technically experienced IOI persons to play a role here. Djura finds that it is an important role of the ISC to keep up consistency from year to year. Greg states that the ISC should, all of the time, check everything that the IOI2003 Host SC does. He wants to know as soon as possible when they are off track. Greg is asked if he can identify some things he wishes to handle differently. He responds with the following items. * Programming environment: consolidate, improve integration of the various components; consider GPC (as Pascal compiler), consider Cygwin (Unix-like environment under Windows); reconsider compiler flags (e.g. put them under control of competitors). He hopes to provide details to the IOI community by the end of January 2003, but this is not a confirmed deadline. * Clarification requests: include more options for answers; this requires a change in the regulations, or at least separate approval; e.g. it should be possible to straighten out a mistake in translation when answering a clarification request. Greg will formulate a proposal for the IC. Tom indicates that a request has been made to allow competitors to bring (printed, approved) dictionaries. * Review meeting: about three months in advance (i.e. May 2003); most likely not on-site but in the Boston area (where most IOI2003 Host SC members reside). 8. General issues. Ian asks about the composition of the ISC, in particular its size. Tom responds that the IC has discussed this matter, considering the need and possibilities for an extension of the number of ISC members. The advantage of a small committee is that it is more flexible in its operation. However, if more work needs to be done, the this may require more members. 9. Tom closes the meeting.