Organizers
The Olympiad is organized by the Ministry of Education and another appropriate institutions and organizations of one of the following countries: Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Greece, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. According to the rules accepted by the initiators of the BOI, teams of these countries are invited as regular participants. Moreover, the host country may invite guest participants as well. Enlarging or decreasing the set of BOI countries can only be adopted by consensus.
Goals
The BOI aims at motivating secondary school students of East Europe to:
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get more interested in informatics and information technology in general,
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test and prove their competence in solving problems with the help of computers,
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exchange knowledge and experience with other students of similar interest and qualification,
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establish personal contacts with young people of the East European region.
Additionally, the BOI may :
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provide training for the students participating in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI),
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initiate discussion and co-operation in informatics education in the secondary schools of the East European countries.
General Regulations
Each team is composed of up to four secondary school students, and two team leaders. Only the costs of travel to and from the place of the competition should be paid by teams. All local expenses, provided for by general regulation are covered by the organizers. Accompanying persons and observers are welcome, but they should pay for their stay. Interested people are advised to contact local organizers.
The official language is English. Students may use their mother tongue. Programming problems will be formulated in English and then translated by the team leaders to the mother tongue of their team. Both versions will be given to students. Team leaders must be able to speak and write in English, as well as the language of their team.
The computers will be IBM PCs compatible with selected software packages. Only the computers and software with built-in help facilities provided by the organizers may be used in the competition. The use of digital, printed, sound and other materials will be forbidden. The programming languages of the contest are Pascal, C and C++. The precise versions of these languages will be updated each year. The compilers and programming environments for the above mentioned programming languages will be installed on the hard disk.
Team Composition
Students have to be in school during the year when the contest is held and at most 15.5 years old. The team leaders will be members of the General Assembly.
General Assembly
General Assembly is composed of the team leaders of the participating teams and the president, nominated by the host country. General Assembly selects problems to be solved in the competition from a set of problems prepared and proposed by the Scientific Committee.
The selection procedure is the following:
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The chairman of the Scientific Committee distributes the proposals. Their number equals the number of problems to be solved by the contestants.
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The GA members may either accept or, in case of a major ambiguity of formulation or other serious reasons, deny the proposals by voting. When and if a proposal is denied, another prepared proposal will be offered to the GA. For such cases, the Scientific Committee should prepare at least two extra proposals for each round. The text of the accepted proposals must not be changed by the GA, except for minor rephrasing that is needed to avoid smaller ambiguities.
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The selected problems will be translated by the team leaders into the national languages of the teams.
Scientific Committee
The Scientific Committee (SC) consists of a chairman and a number of experts (SC members) from the host country. It becomes active well before the beginning of the Olympiad and has the task of selecting and preparing problems proposals. Another task of the Scientific Committee is to test and evaluate the solutions of the contestants.
Problems. Competition
The competition consists of two rounds in two days. In both rounds the working time is five hours and the contestants will be given one to four problems to solve. The selected problems will be translated by the team leaders into the national languages of the teams.
Within the first hour the contestants may submit written questions (either in English or in their national language) to the Scientific Committee concerning the formulation and interpretation of the problems. Only questions that can be answered with 'Yes', 'No' or 'No comment' may be accepted. The answers will be produced by the members of the Scientific Committee and approved by the chairman of the SC as soon as possible.
When the competition ends, each contestant should prepare his/her solution for the evaluation, according to regulations issued by the organizers.
No special hardware requirement or software packages (e.g. graphic packages) will be needed to solve the problems. The whole communication between the BOI authorities and contestants will be in a written form.
Evaluation
When the working time is over, the solutions of each of the contestant will be checked by an evaluator, using previously unpublished test data. The evaluation is based on the test data and the responses of the programs only.
The evaluation procedure concludes with the meeting of the Scientific Committee, where the evaluation reports are discussed. Potential disagreements are dissolved by voting. Achieving a proper and balanced evaluation is the responsibility of the Scientific Committee. If a team leader does not accept the results of the evaluation, he/she may appeal to the General Assembly.
Finally, the president of SC presents the anonymous results to the General Assembly to take final decisions.
Results and Prizes
The General Assembly will determine the minimum scores for the gold, silver and bronze medals. The proportion of these gold, silver and bronze medals should be approximately 1:2:3. About 50% of the contestants should receive medals. Each contestant will receive a certificate of participation. The medals, certificates and other prizes will be given to the contestants at the official closing ceremony.
