The 2nd International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence – IOAI Beijing

Date of the Article: 10 Sep 2025

Date: 2 - 7 Aug 2025
Student: S5A CHENG Lai-yin
Achievement: Gold Medal

Students’ Sharing
Where Talents Inspire Talents: My IOAI Story

Selection and Training

I remember the excitement I felt when I first heard of the “IOAI Hong Kong Selection” in September last year. Not only was it about AI, one of the topics I’m most interested in, but it also opens the door to an eye-opening opportunity: an international competition that would greatly enrich my learning experience. I immediately spoke with my teacher about it and began reading AI-related materials as I tried to form a team of four people to apply for the selection.

In the end, I managed to form a team to compete in the first round of the selection. It was already interesting, covering topics such as forecasting supermarket sales, as well as training (and analyzing) models to identify male faces from female faces. These captivating problems sparked my interest in AI even further.

We advanced to the second-round selection, which focused on Python programming, and two of us, me and LAI Hong-kiu of 4A, advanced to the final round, which involved classifying whether an X-ray image contained signs of lung cancer.

The surprise came when I knew that I had been selected for the eight-member Hong Kong team, which meant I would be able to compete in the 2nd International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence - IOAI Beijing !

As the IOAI is so new, the training cycle was short compared to the year-round training of other academic olympiads. Our main focus after selection was the at-home tasks in July, which related to some of the actual IOAI questions we might encounter. While we were able to discuss the solutions to those problems (as well as the underlying concepts) with our teammates and coaches, we had to do most of the work on our own. Personally, I participated in several Kaggle competitions (a renowned AI/ML platform) to sharpen my skills, and was encouraged by the satisfactory results I achieved in these competitions.

There was also a robotics-related “team challenge” in the competition, but as it did not factor into the medal allocations, it was not the main focus of our training.

Competition Experience

Arriving in Beijing, I was excited by the opportunity to exchange knowledge and experiences with my fellow international AI enthusiasts, and was also nervous about the intensive competition schedule ahead.

The team challenge on August 4 commenced right after the opening ceremony. Our team of four (the Hong Kong team was split into two groups of four for this challenge) struggled to navigate the complex codebase of the robot, which is so often the case in the real world. We used up half the competition time just to understand what the baseline code was doing, and in the end we were not able to improve upon it within the time constraint.

Then came the individual contests on August 5 and 6, which accounted for all medal allocations. It consisted of two six-hour competition days, in which we attempted to solve 6 AI-related problems (3 per day) by improving on the baseline code the organizers provided to us. I was really nervous on the first day, spending too much time on a simple code implementation and even missing a workaround that would have been the gateway to a higher score.

I still remember getting stuck on a classical machine learning task on the second day. I tried different algorithms almost blindly to no avail, and began to think I would have to settle for an unsatisfactory result, especially compared to my performance on the first day. Here came the Eureka moment, I was able to salvage my competition when the ideas I needed suddenly pop into my mind in the last hour. This experience reflected some remaining insufficiencies in my understanding about AI/ML topics and highlighted that I was still relatively inexperienced compared to my fellow competitors.

In the contest hall (photo by organizer)

After the Competition

Time flew by during the party in Haidian Park the evening of the final competition, and the cultural visit to the Summer Palace the following day. The breathtaking sceneries reflected the diverse geography, and most importantly, the rich traditional culture of our country. I marveled at the traditional Chinese architectures while appreciating how seamlessly they blended with the modern tourism styles and technology. We also had great social experiences connecting with our teammates and other teams, discussing all things AI — from AI education to our performances in the IOAI. Like the old sayings said, “Talents inspire talents.”

In front of a temple in the Summer Palace with Team China

I learned a great deal from discussing problems with the other competitors online and in-person (in fact, these discussions continued well after we returned home). It turned out that they framed the problems in very diverse ways, some of which resulted in solutions that were superior to mine. For example, I discovered that one problem (the only one I wasn’t able to score) could be viewed as a one-to-one matching problem instead of a simple similarity search — the key insight behind some of the top-scoring solutions.

In the end, our team shone bright at the IOAI, taking 1 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronze medals, as well as 3 honorable mentions. While I managed to secure a gold medal, I was most impressed by the silver medalist’s performance — he achieved first place in the world on the second task (the “chicken counting” problem), one of the most challenging problems in the IOAI.

The Hong Kong Team just before leaving Beijing

No doubt this precious experience provided some of the best memories of my young life. Not only was I able to connect with like-minded AI enthusiasts, but I was also impressed by the academic atmosphere of the newly-minted (only in its 2nd edition!) high-school AI olympiad competition. We all look forward to the development of this fast-changing and novel field of AI, and have become even more committed to promoting an understanding of AI principles to our fellow students.

Gold Medalists, Prize Presentation