As this year's IOI is around the corner, I have been thinking about

Two metrics to quantify skill

Before talking about

The dynamics of gold medalists

Inspired by E869120's blog on winning a gold medal at IOI, I have put much thought into what it takes to achieve each kind of medal. When it comes to gold medalists, it seems like there are two main classes: those who were able to be fairly confident (>70% chance):about winning a gold medal going into IOI, and those who were confident about winning a silver, and had some chance (20~70%) at a gold medal. Just for a very rough estimate, I would say that those who rank 16th to 60th in raw skill fall under the second category, which I believe includes myself for this year.

For this group of competitors, playing the safe strategy of spending a roughly equal amount of time on each problem and grabbing as many subtasks as possible would be able to secure a silver medal. However, when it comes to the race for a gold, it is much more dependent on the problemset for that year, which naturally introduces quite a large element of chance.