Moscow Workshops Juniors 2022

Format of the Moscow Workshops Junior

The Moscow Workshops Juniors are held by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology as as organizers, who have experience with competitive programming. The take place online from February 22 – March 2 2022. During a total of 72 hours, the participants deepen their knowledge about Algorithms and test their newly found skills at challenging tasks. The training is held in 3 divisions (A, B, C) separated by difficulty.

At a typical day, there is a contest in the morning followed by a discussion of the problems. In the afternoon, there are several Lectures. This is followed by individually solving practice tasks, which cover the topics of the preceding lecture.

There are several choices offered for the lectures every day. The lectures are held in English (and Russian).

Qualification Contests

There are 4 qualification contests at the following dates:

• Sunday, December 26. 2021 at 10:00 Swiss time (12:00 Moscow Time, UTC+3)
• Sunday, January 16. 2022 at 10:00 Swiss time (12:00 Moscow Time, UTC+3)
• Sunday, January 30. 2021 at 10:00 Swiss time (12:00 Moscow Time, UTC+3)
• Sunday, February 6. 2021 at 10:00 Swiss time (12:00 Moscow Time, UTC+3)

The contests take 4 hours and consist of 6 tasks. To qualify, one needs to solve at least 4 tasks in any of the contests. There are no partial points; in any task one either get full score or no points at all.

In the past year the task were, compared with typical SOI tasks, on the implementation heavy side (i.e. there is less focus on finding the right idea, but more effort to correctly implement a found solution) .

The qualification tasks have a medium difficulty level. For someone who has already solved finals tasks and is experienced in solving tasks within limited time, qualifying should be doable. If you participate for the first time and don’t have much practice or if you aren’t familiar with all the topics from 2H, you shouldn’t be disappointed, if you don’t qualify.

The grader of the contests can be found here:

To participate at the qualification contests, one needs to sign up at the official website.

How does this relate to SOI

SOI recommends participants to use this opportunity to improve their competitive programming skills. SOI supports participants through the following ways:

• The participation at the Moscow Workshops Junior costs $210 (or less for participants, who already won a price at a national or international competition). SOI pays for these costs for all participants who qualified for the 2nd Round of SOI (and who qualify for the MWJ at one of the qualification contests) .
• SOI helps participants to be suspended from school during these two weeks. We can provide a school leave document on request. Please notice, that in the week before the Moscow Workshops Junior, the SOI training camp takes place. Some schools need a early hand in of the request to grant a suspension of 3 weeks in total.
• At each Saturday before a qualification contest, we offer from 19:00 - 21:00 a discussion of the tasks from the previous qualification contest as a preparation of the next one. The discussions take place on Discord. We also answer, that are asked per mail or on Discord in a text channel (please mark as spoiler) .

The participation at the Moscow Workshops Juniors only gives an advantage for the 2nd Round due to the increased amount of practice. There might be lectures, which cover topics, that are not covered at SOI or are only covered in preparation for the Finals or IOI. The knowledge from these lectures doesn’t help for solving the problems of the 2nd round. The in-depth training though, will help participants to find ideas to solve a task more quickly, structure their code in a better way and find bugs more effectively. There are various other ways to train, that achieve comparable results.

Report by Erik Klein from the previous year (in German)

Die Moscow Workshops Juniors sind gut geeignet für Teilnahmer, die das internationale Level erreichen wollen. Es ist big bang for the buck, d.h. man zahlt 100-130$ und man erhält dafür lohnenswert viel:

Jeden Tag löst man in vier Stunden sechs Probleme, von mittleren bis zu schweren. Es ist eine richtige Contest-Atmosphäre, d.h. man steht unter Druck durch die Zeit und sieht, welche Probleme die anderen schon gelöst haben im Ranking, was motivierend und ein gutes Training für die IOI-Auswahl/Finals ist.

Danach gibt es einen Lösungsvortrag, der alle Probleme erklärt, meist von Tikhomirov (Endagorion auf Codeforces). Er erklärt logisch und sehr verständlich.

Man lernt oft neue Techniken oder wiederholt bekannte.

Es gibt auch Vorträge, ich kannte entweder die leichten Themen schon, oder die schweren waren für IOI und Finals unnötig, wie z.B. Link-Cut Tree, Directed MST, Flow oder Spieltheorie. Diese Vorträge samt Übungsaufgaben halte ich für nebensächlich, da man nach dem Contest und Analyse eh schon zu müde ist.