Nonetheless, I'm still questioning what's the cost and how long it would take for us to be able to access these models.
Still great work, but it's less useful if the cost is actually higher than hiring someone with the same level.
How do you compare those?
There were at least 2 very simple problems in IOI this year.
I haven't read the ICPC problem set, and perhaps there are some low-hanging fruits, but I highly doubt it.
Another evidence is that you only have 5 hours to solve 3 problems in IOI, but you need to solve 10+ problems in ICPC. It's impossible to have all 10+ problems to at IOI level in ICPC.
Isn't getting a medal a function of your ranking, not score, in both cases? If so, that does not prove much about the difficulty of either.
Yes, medal is function of ranking but not difficulty.
Nonetheless, I would say that IOI more focus on thinking, which I to some degree is not that good at, while ICPC is more like a mix thinking and implementing. Therefore, my ability to implement stuff can improve my ICPC ranking but not IOI.
Sure, you need to be individually good at thinking, etc. But the difference between 1st and places further down the ranking is teamwork.
(In a certain sense, this is actually the ideal "teamwork" setup in the industry as well, to have a bunch of people who own their part and are trusted by their colleagues take care of it and not step on each other toes than kumbaya let's all get together on the same problem.)
We were "just" three friends who had studied together for 4 years, knew each other's strengths and weaknesses intimately, and then for the comp trained intensively on optimising the "parallelization/scheduling" aspects (as you put it) to get the best score in the minimum time. That included both the logistical and mental aspects of recovering from setbacks midway through the 5 hour problem sets.
During the finals, you'd be surprised how many teams' teamwork we saw fall apart when three very smart people under intense time pressure hit unexpectedly failing submissions with the bottleneck of a single computer. ICPC is a genius format.
I'd go as far as saying that gold at the IOI is probably easier than getting an ICPC medal. (One is individual and the other is in teams, but my point stands).
Totally agree that IOI bronze is way easier than ICPC bronze. In terms of rank/ratio, ICPC medals are more like IOI gold.
I stated things like that because I thought it's a bit easier to let people know the difficulty difference. (Agree weirdly though)
Doesn't say anything about the difficulty of the questions themselves though.
For fractional scores, it depends on problems. In short, there are two types of problems in IOI. One is traditional problems that requires 100% correctness, and the other is continuous scoring.
The prior can still results in score between 0 and 100, but this is because there are subtasks in the problem. For example, a graph become a tree or even just a linear sequence. Nonetheless, you still need to ensure your algorithm is correct on all testcases in that subtask in order to get the score of that task.