Zhiyuan Qi
Zhiyuan believes that computer science is the future of the world and his passion for computer programming has gained him a place representing New Zealand at the International Informatics Olympiad in Japan.
Hi, my name is Zhiyuan Qi and I’m currently a Year 11 student at Auckland Grammar School. I am honoured to have been selected for the International Olympiad in Informatics (along with three other students). This particular Olympiad is about solving mathematical programming problems efficiently, under time and memory constraints.
I enjoy programming because it allows me to unleash my creativity and to create anything I want. It has always fascinated me how writing lines of code can control entire robots or create sophisticated worlds. From this, I’ve always been curious about how computers themselves work, and that is what has led me to take an interest in computer science.
I believe that learning computer science is the future of the world, as automated machines start becoming a bigger part of our everyday life. Learning about how everything is structured and linked together in a computer program, all to produce something that has real world effect is very inspiring, and I feel that it allows better programs to be written overall. Competitive programming takes all of these aspects and allows participants to think from multiple angles and to come up with a suitable solution.
Other than programming, I also enjoy drawing and writing in my spare time. In the future, I hope to study computer science at university and maybe one day become a professor. I feel that research into computer science would be very rewarding to help make new discoveries in computer science that can benefit everyone. Otherwise, I would love to work at a software giant like Google or Apple to help advance consumer software products. I am extremely grateful to have the opportunity to compete in this Olympiad.