🇻🇳 Nguyen Huu Tuan

The International Olympiad in Informatics is the older and more established of the two events. Contestants sit two five-hour rounds of algorithmic problems, each solved by writing a program that must be both correct and fast enough to run inside strict time and memory limits on adversarial test data. Partial credit exists, which means the scoreboard rarely produces ties and the gap between a silver and a gold is often a single subtask. At Tashkent, 375 contestants from 92 countries and territories competed; 188 won medals — 32 gold, 62 silver, 94 bronze — with a further 42 receiving certificates of commendation. Tuan's gold placed him inside the top 32 of that field.

The IOAI is new, in its third edition, and tests something different. Where informatics rewards the construction of a provably correct algorithm, an artificial-intelligence olympiad asks students to build and tune working machine-learning systems under time pressure, which requires practical engineering judgement more than proof technique. The two disciplines overlap less than an outsider might assume, which is what makes doing both in one week unusual rather than merely impressive.

Tuan's record before 2026 already showed the pattern. He took gold at the IOAI in 2025 and again in 2026, gold at the 2026 Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad, and gold at the 2026 IOI, with silver medals at the 2024 IOI and the 2024 APIO. That is a four-year progression from silver to gold at the same competition, which in olympiad terms is the ordinary route — what is not ordinary is holding the top result in two different fields simultaneously.

The team result gives useful context. All four members of Vietnam's IOI delegation were decorated: Tuan's gold, silver medals for Dang Huy Hau of Thang Long High School for the Gifted in Lam Dong and Nguyen Bui Duc Dung of Tuan's own school, and a certificate of commendation for Nguyen Khanh Phuc, a tenth-grade student from Ninh Binh. Vietnam finished eighth in the medal table, behind China, the Republic of Korea, the United States, Malaysia, Japan, Poland and Türkiye — a group of countries with far larger national training programmes.

Competitive programming at this level is a trained skill built on years of solved problems, and national teams are selected through long elimination sequences. Reaching the international final is itself a filter that removes almost everyone; winning gold inside it means outperforming students who have already survived the same filter in their own countries. Doing so twice in one August, in two separate disciplines, is the reason the Vietnamese press treated the result as a national story rather than a routine olympiad announcement.

The 2026 IOI was held under the Olympic flag for contestants from Russia, Belarus, Israel and Turkmenistan, and its closing ceremony took place on 15 August in Tashkent. Tuan's own age and date of birth have not been published by the Ministry or by the reporting outlets; he is described only as a twelfth-grade student, and this profile does not estimate beyond that.