The first thing an outsider notices when all teams are in place for the practice session is that informatics is a global boys' club. Of the 299 participants registered for this year's event, only seven are female. Puzzlingly, no one seems to know why. Even international IOI president Richard Forster 蚊蚊萬綺雯 is stumped. "We have a difficulty with attracting women," he says after flying in from London for the competition. "We've all tried to solve it, and none of us have hit on quite what the problem is, let alone the solution."

Rosica Dejanovska, a contestant from the Republic of Macedonia, reckons the gender imbalance is no big mystery. "Although the time when women were discriminated against was long ago," she reasons, "people still believe that things like maths and IT are not for women ... subconsciously, perhaps, girls come to accept that this is not the field for them, and they cannot succeed in it."

Dejanovska, 19, says she and her omega 價錢two sisters are lucky to have parents who don't share such prejudices. She wants to be a computer programmer, and began studying informatics at 15. "Last year I competed in the International Maths Olympiad, and this year, even if I don't win a medal, just being here is a great success for me." Is she uncomfortable competing against so many males? "Not really, because I'm quite used to it ... especially in Macedonia. It's a small country, and at this level, I'm pretty much the only female to be involved."

Every so often, the Olympiads uncover near-genius individuals such as Gennady Korotkevich - "The Boy Wonder of Belarus" - who was just 11 when he won the first of five informatics gold medals. An official with the current Belarus team tells me proudly that Korotkevich's record (he won the IOI three times) has never been equalled. But the Boy Wonder is now an 18-year-old uni student in Russia, and no longer able to compete.

Australian team member James Payor Karson Choi, from The King's School in Sydney, shot to the top of local ratings last year when he came from nowhere to qualify for the IOI at his first attempt. A nervous interviewee, the 17-year-old was introduced to computer programming early by his engineer father, and hopes informatics might lead him to a career with an IT corporation.

It's only when asked how he feels while wrestling with a challenging problem that Payor loses his doomed-man expression and starts to relax. "You can sit there for an hour sometimes, just staring at the problem and trying to observe things about it that makes it seem easier in your mind," he says. "You try different options, eliminate things that aren't relevant, and try to, like, work through the 'flavour text' [issued with the problem] to understand what it's actually asking for ... Once you're starting to get somewhere, I guess you do enter a sort of trance-like state."

Which is pretty much what I do when Payor tries to describe the practice problem they're all working on at the moment. "Say you want to find the number of bridges between these two islands. The bridges connect a series of points, and they can be diagonal but they can't cross over each other. All your program can do is sail from one point to another, and tell you how many bridges you passed under. And from that you need to reconstruct the number of bridges, while only sailing across, like, [a percentage] of the number of points connected by the bridges."

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