IOAI 2026

The Individual Contest is the main competition of the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2026, held in Astana, Kazakhstan. It ran over two on-site days, with three tasks per day and a fresh notebook environment for each task.

The same six tasks were also used for the GAITE Contest, which adds per-task hints and is scored on a separate ranking.

Tasks

Day 1

#	Task	Time limit	Summary
1	Find the Order	10 min	Spoken English dialogues are split into one .wav per speaker turn and shuffled. Reconstruct the original turn order.
2	Robot Chasing	5 min	Six robots in $6 \times 6$ gridworlds, each given a natural-language instruction. Predict the behaviour it describes.
3	Potato	10 min	A word-guessing game: find a hidden word within 30 turns, given only pairwise "which is semantically closer" comparisons.

Day 2

#	Task	Time limit	Summary
4	Double Agent Dilemma	12 min	A ResNet18 and a ViT-Tiny both classify the same images at 100% accuracy. Exploit where the two architectures disagree.
5	Ghost of the Machine	10 min	Machine-altered passages have been slipped into an archive of books. Locate the edits.
6	IOAI Field	5 min	Model the IOAI logo as a spatial function $F(x, y, \overline{W})$ and train a generator from scratch — no pretrained weights.

Every task ran on one GPU (≈16 GB VRAM) with no internet access and 5 GB of storage. Solution size limits are stated in each task's statement.

What's in each task folder

Every task folder has the same shape:

<N>_<Task_Name>/
  README.md               how to run the baseline, score solutions, and where the data lives
  statement.md            official English statement (authoritative)
  statement.pdf           rendered English statement
  <figures>               images referenced by the statement
  Translations/           statements reviewed and corrected by team leaders
  AI-Translation/         machine translations, 44 languages — see its README
  code/                   official contest baseline & grader, plus unofficial educational notebooks

Task data is not stored in this repository — each task's dataset (public and private subsets) is published on Hugging Face, linked from that task's README.md. The unofficial educational notebooks (run anywhere, data straight from Hugging Face) cover tasks 1–5; IOAI Field ships only the contest originals for now, because its protected field runtime is platform-locked (CPython 3.13, x86-64).

Two sets of translations are shipped, and they are not equivalent:

• Translations/ — the versions actually handed to contestants. Each delegation's team leader read and corrected their own language. .md and .pdf per country. These take precedence.
• AI-Translation/ — machine translations into 44 languages (plus the English source), generated automatically and not human-verified. Useful for coverage, but they may contain errors. See the README inside any AI-Translation/ folder.

Translation coverage differs by day: Day 1 tasks have 74 country versions in Translations/, Day 2 tasks have 44. English appears as United-Kingdom on Day 1 and ISC on Day 2.

Credits

Task authors

Task	Proposed by	Developed by
Find the Order	Nurdaulet Akhanov	Nurdaulet Akhanov
Robot Chasing	Salem Lahlou	Anuar Aimoldin · Kamalkhan Artykbayev · Nurdaulet Akhanov
Potato	Kirill Fedyanin	Ayana Mussabayeva · Kirill Fedyanin
Double Agent Dilemma	Tao Dajiang	Tao Dajiang · Zhuldyz-Zhan Sagimbayev · Kamalkhan Artykbayev
Ghost of the Machine	Alexander D'yakonov · Nurdaulet Akhanov	Nurdaulet Akhanov · Kirill Fedyanin
IOAI Field	Evgenii Tsymbalov	Evgenii Tsymbalov · Ekaterina Fadeeva · Daniil Kazantsev · Maiya Goloburda · Magauiya Zhussip

The AI track was prepared by Abhishek Divekar, Magauiya Zhussip, Kamalkhan Artykbayev, and Temiko Machavariani.

Host Scientific Committee

Ayana Mussabayeva · Anuar Aimoldin · Zhuldyz-Zhan Sagimbayev · Kamalkhan Artykbayev · Magauiya Zhussip · Temiko Machavariani · Nurdaulet Akhanov

International Scientific Committee

Anuar Aimoldin · Nurdaulet Akhanov · Alexander D'yakonov · Abhishek Divekar · Kirill Fedyanin · Michael Guerzhoy · Yova Kementchedjhieva · Roy Ka-Wei Lee · Muhammad Rizki Maulana · Maxim Panov · Anna Piunova · Ali Sharifi-Zarchi · Paulina Tomaszewska · Evgenii Tsymbalov · Zijie Zheng

International Jury

Nurdaulet Akhanov · Abhishek Divekar · Kirill Fedyanin · Yova Kementchedjhieva · Roy Ka-Wei Lee · Muhammad Rizki Maulana · Maxim Panov · Anna Piunova · Evgenii Tsymbalov · Zijie Zheng

Special thanks

Aleksandr Domoratskiy · Damir Ismagilov · Tatiana Kolinkova · Davlet Sibgatullin · Nikita Sychev — and all members of the Yandex Contest Platform Team.

АО НИТ, for providing GPUs.

And thanks to the delegation team leaders, who translated and reviewed the statements in Translations/ overnight between contest days.