"The Singapore National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) is modelled after the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), the ultimate international competition in computing (Informatics is the European term for computer science). NOI emphasises creativity in problem solving on the one hand, and programming skill and expertise on the other.
On a wider scope, NUS hopes that the competition will spur interest within the school community, and create more awareness among the students and teachers on the finer points of programming, which is not merely writing a piece of code, but involves useful algorithmic techniques and problem-solving skills. This aims to equip the students with knowledge beyond that of a mere IT application user, in line with Singapore national goal of creating an IT-savvy nation.
The 1st NOI was hosted by School of Computing (SoC) of National University of Singapore (NUS) back in year 1998. SoC has annually hosted NOI from then on. Since 2016 (the 19th NOI), Singapore NOI is opened to limited foreign contestants on an invitational basis
SIMCC has been appointed to register Singapore students whose schools do not participate in the NOI. Additionally, SIMCC offers registration for students in Grades 7-12 from over 50 countries to compete in the Singapore NOI Online Preliminary.
NOI consists of a five-hours session in which each contestant is required to individually solve and program a solution to each of the four to five programming tasks (with subtasks of varying difficulties). The solutions are judged according to their correctness (i.e. whether they produce the correct answers) as well as the resources used (i.e. producing the answers within a time, memory, and/or other special limits). The actual time spent on programming will not be taken into account in the evaluation.
Each contestant works on a PC and is given a choice of programming language to use. For more information, please refer to the Competition page."
