Conducting Complex Competitions in Informatics with Individual Tasks

Most olympiads in informatics are actually programming contests, sometimes it is stressed by the rules ?tasks must be of algorithmical nature“. Meanwhile, now informatics covers almost all branches of human activity and participation in competitions with wide spectrum would be of interest to young people. To prevent participants from copying answers from others, we propose to generate individual tasks from personal data to achieve uniqueness (all contestants would receive different versions of tasks). Also, we draw attention to tasks of “output-only” and “open-ended” types (which can be also called “semi-algorithmical” because the contestant combines intuition with using algorithms, which may be known in advance or devised while solving) and optimization tasks with unknown exact answers. The main problem is automated assessment of solutions of various tasks, some techniques are proposed.