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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

> If you take Russia and Ukraine aside, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland have less than 80 million citizens together, but have accounted for 261 Gold Medals through the years, more than China or USA, the World’s two Superpowers. Of course, most of those students (and the ones that don’t qualify to the International but are way above the world’s average) leave Romania (or Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria) to more prosperous, more developed countries.

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland had 7.5x the slots than China, and only produced 1.23 times the gold medals. Not that impressive.

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Yeah, that was a very weird comparison. Not only do those countries send 6 people each, those four started participating in 1959 while US started in 1974 and China in 1985. Though arguably, those first olympiads featured fewer countries, (with presumably stronger competition) so they had to compete against each other for medals.

Another factor might be the number of distinct participants. I believe the Chinese enforce a one-participation limit, though I don't know if that would make it more or less likely to get gold.

Slots aren't meaningful. There is very little random variation in performance on the event. More slots per capita just means more room for less capable people to compete and lose.

On most years China wins six golds, so more slots would definitely lead to more golds.

of course they are. The Chinese team selection tests are notoriously more difficult than the IMO, and they enforce a one-time participation limit. If they were to send 24 people, not only would they probably be returning with ~20 golds, they'd be taking away the golds of the other nations (as only the top 1/12 get gold)

Yes, China having more slots would mean unclear factor of more gold medals for China. (Although China has only earned 6 gold medals in half of its years, and 5 or 6 gold medals in only 24/34 years, despite having 1/6 the world population so proportionally should claim ">8" of the ~50 gold medals each year, so China does appear to be under performing the average country (per capita) in half the years.)

But those 4 smaller countries having 1/7 slots wouldn't mean 1/7 gold medals, since they only send 5-10 gold medalists each year in those slots.

Romania averages over 1 gold medal per year. China, with 70x the population of Romania, should easily be getting 6 gold medals per year almost every year and about 70 theoretical golds of their deep bench got tested, if it has comparable per capita performance to Romania.

Of course all these stats are kind of silly because of sampling limitations.

Genuine question: Why did they have more slots?

(Sure, I could Google this, but I'm guessing this question may lead to some interesting conversation :) )

Because they are 4 countries, and china is only 1. Also they started IMO, and china first participated 26 years later.

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