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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

Astonishing performance (3rd place) by North Korea with pop. around 25m. Not sure what incentives were in place for the contestants.

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North Korea was caught cheating twice, and is the only country to have been caught cheating at the IMOs so far, so I would take their ranking with a grain of salt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...

How does one cheat at a test of this sort?

Team leaders know the question in advance. They are seperated from the team, but if they want to communicate they can.

http://www.quora.com/How-did-North-Korea-cheat-in-the-IMO-in...

Edit: have a read of this page. It shows that marking is not just a case of comparing the answer papers with a pre-prepared answer script. There is discussion and debate involved. http://www.imo-register.org.uk/2010-report.html

> Problem 4 was the second geometry problem, and so I led. We agreed four 7s straight away. The disputes were that I wanted a 7 for Luke Betts, and the co-ordinators were only offering 3 because they thought that there was a hole in his argument. On the other hand, they wanted to give Andrew Carlotti a 7 but I was only prepared to take 3. I explained to them the weakness in Carlotti’s argument, and they looked a little surprised. I asked them about the alleged weakness in Betts’s script, and I couldn’t understand what they were worried about. I suggested an overnight adjournment so that we could both make detailed preparations, and we met again the next day.

Interesting. Thanks for the response!

Just being able to communicate among the 6 participants would be enough to make a huge difference. It's like if 6 people took an SAT test together, they'd likely do better than any one could do individually.

Singapore at the 10th with fewer than 6 million people is also quite noteworthy. I wonder how much it has to do with importing talents or talented families from abroad, and how much from training starting at a young age.

(I know that Thailand does have a series of math competition for kids starting at grade 3. This was started less than 20 years ago, which helps explain its much improved IMO performance over the last decade.)

Any Singaporeans care to explain?

Singapore set up NUS high school a couple of years ago to nurture development of students talented in maths and science. I remember a ex IMO coach from was hired from China to prepare for the competition. it is not surprising it stands at tenth place if you have long term plan for it. btw 6 mio people are total population out of which only 3mio are singaporean. but if you are really talented and wealthy, you can quickly become singaporean

Thanks for posting this. I've always wondered how come we "suddenly" started performing really well in the IMOs.

Considering the fact that until 2011, we had only won ONE gold medal and rarely featured in the top 30.

But from 2011 onwards, have won 10 gold medals and have started to consistently appear in the top 10.

Background: Singaporean who once aspired into getting into the IMO team [this was circa <=2004]. But ended up with a crappy silver medal in the informatics olympiad. Now a washed up, recovering Perl hacker.

Thanks for your reply. From my experience teaching math to gifted students, it takes a lot longer than a couple of years to develop talents at this level though. Starting young (by elementary school) seems to be a requirement.

Perhaps there might have been special tracks and/or competitions to help nurture these kids and their peers for quite a while before the NUS high school was set up?

North Korea in 4th place: https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2015

South Korea, according to the article.

North Korea placed 4th.[0]

[0] https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2015

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