🇺🇿 Jakhonali Khaydaraliev

The IOI is a competitive programming olympiad, not a coding-speed contest. It is held over two competition days, each five hours long, with three problems per day. Contestants write programs in C++ against algorithmic tasks that are then run on hidden test data under strict time and memory limits. Scoring is partial: a submission that is correct but too slow earns points on the smaller subtasks and loses them on the large ones, so the score reflects not just whether a contestant solved the problem but how efficient their solution was.

That partial-credit structure is why IOI scores are decimal and why the spread across a medal band is wide. The material — graph algorithms, dynamic programming, data structures, computational geometry, amortised analysis — is university-level, but the constraint that makes it an olympiad is the clock. Five hours for three problems means a contestant must triage: recognise which task is tractable, secure the guaranteed subtask points, and only then attempt the full-credit solution. Contestants who chase the hardest problem first routinely finish below contestants who solved less but banked more.

The 38th edition ran from 9 to 16 August 2026 and was hosted by Uzbekistan for the first time. Official statistics record 375 registered contestants from 92 delegations, of whom 368 competed, and 188 medals awarded — 32 gold, 62 silver and 94 bronze. The overall winner was Qiwen Xu of China with 498.27 points, who took the Grand Prize. Telegram's founder Pavel Durov funded a set of digital collectibles for medallists, guaranteed at more than $117,000 in total, with a floor of $1,000 for each gold.

Khaydaraliev's 303.48 was the highest score on the Uzbek main team and the country's only silver. It was also part of a first: all four members of Uzbekistan's main team medalled at the same IOI, with bronzes for Timur Kadirbergenov on 295.79, Ulug'bek Rakhmatullaev on 288.58 and Jahongirshoh Avazkhonov on 285.97. The four scores sit within eighteen points of one another, which is a narrow band for an olympiad with a 600-point scale.

Uzbekistan first competed at the IOI in 2015. Its previous best was one silver and one bronze at the 2025 olympiad in Sucre, Bolivia, so the 2026 result — four medals from four contestants, on home ground — was a step change rather than an increment. Hosting also carries a specific pressure for the home team: the contestants sit the same papers as everyone else, under the same conditions, but in front of a domestic audience and a national press that has been covering the event for months.

The Muhammad al-Khwarizmi Specialized School, where Khaydaraliev studies, is named after the ninth-century Khwarezmian mathematician whose Latinised name gave the word "algorithm" its form, and whose treatise on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system gave "algebra" its name. It is one of a set of specialist secondary schools Uzbekistan has built around mathematics and information technology. Khaydaraliev was the youngest by school year on the 2026 team, which means — as with any ninth-grader who medals — that he has several more editions of eligibility ahead of him.