Format
Students face a variety of challenges in five key disciplines. The format combines theoretical knowledge with mathematical and algorithmic challenges, followed by practical AI model development.
Scientific Round
Paper-based: mathematical and algorithmic problems — not a written report. Students type their answers on the provided laptop and submit a PDF. A feedback session follows the same day.
Practical Round
Code-based: a full day of hands-on model development. Each competitor uses one laptop provided by the organisers with the environment and data preloaded; a test run is held the day before.
Source: the organisers' competition page and FAQ. Details for 2027 are subject to the organisers' announcements.
Syllabus
The ten topic areas published by the organisers for IAIO 2026.
| # | Topic | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Data preparation | Feature engineering; similarity metrics; TF-IDF and word embeddings |
| 2 | Supervised learning | Linear and polynomial regression; decision trees; SVM; Naïve Bayes; L1/L2 regularisation; cross-validation |
| 3 | Unsupervised learning | k-means; hierarchical clustering; Gaussian mixture models; PCA; t-SNE |
| 4 | Reinforcement learning | Markov decision processes; Bellman equations; Q-learning; temporal-difference learning; exploration vs exploitation |
| 5 | AI search | BFS, DFS, uniform-cost search; A* and heuristics; minimax |
| 6 | Logical reasoning | Propositional and first-order logic; CNF; unification; resolution; SAT solvers |
| 7 | Evaluation of ML models | Precision, recall, F1; ROC-AUC; bias–variance trade-off; k-fold cross-validation |
| 8 | Constraint satisfaction | Backtracking; constraint propagation; AC-3; forward checking |
| 9 | Kernel methods | Margin maximisation; soft vs hard margin; the kernel trick; RBF kernel |
| 10 | Recommender systems | Collaborative and content-based filtering; matrix factorisation (SVD, ALS); neural collaborative filtering |
Past paper
The organisers publish the IAIO 2024 Scientific Round test (PDF) — six questions that test understanding of AI concepts and the ability to apply them.