As this year's IOI is around the corner, I have been considering where I stand and what to aim for this year.

Two metrics to quantify skill

First of all, I would like to mention how I think of skill when it comes to OI, as I will be mentioning it later. Each competitor's skill is defined by two metrics: untimed skill and timed skill. I think of these similar to how CF problems are rated: someone's untimed skill level is the difficulty level at which they'd be able to solve 50% of problems given a very long time (say 5 to 10 hours, essentially unlimited). Timed skill is defined similarly, but under the time constraint of 100 minutes per problem (the average time that can be allocated per problem at IOI). I believe that practice targetting each of these aspects is important to improve IOI performance.

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 (15~70%) 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. With this line of thought, for these last two months of practice, I aim to maximise my chances (even if it ends up just being 20 or 30%) of winning a gold medal at IOI 2026.

The dilemma of how to practice

Setting this goal has put me into a dilemma: part of me thinks that focusing on my untimed skill is more important to be able to widen the scope of subtasks I could potentially solve, I am able to pass the gold cutoff on most IOI sets given unlimited time, which makes me wonder if I should instead improve my speed.

That being said, I would like to hear from others who might have been (or currently are) in a similar situation as mine, and it would be greatly appreciated if any advice or thoughts can be given regarding the final push for an IOI gold.

Thanks for reading!