

14-year-old Belarusian wins International Olympiad in Informatics - screwperman
http://ioi2009.org/downloads/br8-3str-en.pdf

======
nopinsight
Although this guy is young, he's been at it several times. He is likely one of
the most experienced among contestants.

I think it is a good example of 'practice makes perfect' and '10,000-hour
rule' for world-class expertise building. (If you count all the hours with
math training as well--though I don't know how much time he spent on math &
com sci together.)

------
nopinsight
Looking at the country list of gold medalists in the bottom-right box, there
seems to be high correlation between the nurturing and availability of very
top talents and the rate of economic development of a nation.

------
ramchip
This is a competition for school students, so the fact that he's 14 isn't very
surprising.

~~~
pesho
He still has four more years of high school and he's already won an absolute
first place at IOI. I don't get what's not very surprising.

~~~
marcog1
From what I hear he has 3 more years. It's damn impressive when you consider
who he had to beat and the problems they were given. He also came into this
year's IOI with two golds and one silver from previous years, so he has a lot
of experience. Another major feat is that he recently became the youngest
TopCoder target (top 20 or so in an open ranking system).

------
ilyak
No doubt. Belarussians are very serious about informatics olympiad these days.

Their "Informatics faciltative of the Young Firefighter Club of Mazyr" team is
known to beat moscow and saint-petersburg teams in north-east european
informatics competition, coming third. And Mazyr a tiny city in the middle of
nowhere, if you're curious.

More on this topic (in russian):
<http://offline.computerra.ru/2008/730/354607/>

~~~
ilyak
Yeah, another interesting point about Mazyr: it's situated on Pripyat river,
not far from Chernobyl.

