🇻🇳 Dang Huy Hau

The IOI is contested over two five-hour rounds of three algorithmic problems each. Scoring is by subtask rather than pass or fail, so contestants accumulate partial credit for restricted versions of a problem before attempting the general case. Around a quarter of the field takes silver. Doing it as an eleventh-grader matters because the national selection processes that produce each four-person team are themselves ferociously competitive, and a student who makes the team a year early has usually beaten several hundred older contestants at home before facing the world.

Thang Long High School for Gifted Students sits in Lam Dong, in Vietnam's Central Highlands — geographically and institutionally at a distance from the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City specialist schools that have historically supplied most of the country's olympiad contestants. Vietnam's gifted-school system is a national network, with a designated specialist high school in most provinces, and the informatics pipeline runs from provincial competitions through a national olympiad to a selection camp.

Vietnam's 2026 result was its strongest at the IOI in some years: eighth in the overall team standings, behind China, South Korea, the United States, Malaysia, Japan, Poland and Türkiye. The gold went to Nguyen Huu Tuan, a twelfth-grader at the High School for Gifted Students under the University of Natural Sciences in Hanoi, who had won gold at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence in Astana the same week; the second silver went to his schoolmate Nguyen Bui Duc Dung.

There is a specific pressure in being the youngest member of a national olympiad team that does not show up in the results table. The problems do not scale to age, the five-hour rounds are the same length, and there is no allowance for having covered less of the syllabus. What an eleventh-grade silver does signal is a second attempt: contestants who medal a year early are usually back the following year with a year of additional preparation and no remaining nerves about the format.

The olympiad ran from 9 to 15 August 2026, hosted by Uzbekistan in Tashkent, and drew 375 contestants from 92 countries and territories. The results were reported in Vietnam by Nhan Dan, Vietnam News and the Vietnam News Agency, all of which named the medallists and their schools; the individual scores are held in the olympiad's public statistics archive, which has recorded every contestant since 1989.

It is worth stating the limits plainly. A silver medal at the IOI identifies a teenager who is among the few hundred strongest competitive algorithmists of his age in the world. It does not measure research ability, originality, or the patience for problems that take years rather than hours, and the competition's own alumni are the first to say so. What it does is open doors — to university programmes, to research groups, and to the next year's team.