International Invitational Math Optimization Challenge

About IIMOC

IIMOC is a global Math/Computer Science competition, centered around challenging optimization problems that are easy to approach but impossible to solve exactly. Teams must use heuristic optimization techniques over a 4-week window to iteratively improve their solutions and climb the leaderboard. The problems are designed to be accessible to college and motivated high school students, while still being deep enough to allow for extended research and improvement.

Teamwork

Solve together as a club. Collaboration is key.

External tooling

We emphasize realism by encouraging the use of external tools to help evaluate and debug your approach locally.

Optimization

Minimize loss or maximize gain in a real-world scenario.

Global Rankings

See how you stack up against teams worldwide.

Partners

IIMOC relies on partnerships to make tough, high-quality contests possible.

IIMOC × FrontierCS 2026

IIMOC 2025 used problems from FrontierCS.

For the next season, we’re going further: instead of a single contest problem, teams will compete on a frontier of many algorithmic tasks sourced from FrontierCS. Each task has a public “best-known” score, and the leaderboard rewards verified improvements.

This format is designed to measure real progress on hard problems, encourage reproducible work, and make improvements visible to everyone—not just within a one-month window.

Many Problems

A curated set of FrontierCS tasks (not just one problem). Teams can specialize, explore, and iterate.

Frontier Scoring

A submission only matters if it beats the current frontier. Improvements update the public best-known score.

Reproducibility

We’ll encourage standardized evaluation via FrontierCS’s tooling (so results are comparable and auditable).

Credit for Δ

Ranking is based on how much you improve the frontier, not how many times you submit.

What to expect:
• A public task list with an initial frontier for each task
• A points system based on verified improvement (Δ over the current frontier)
• Club / team rankings + special awards for novel ideas and clean engineering

We’ll post exact rules and dates once the evaluation + infrastructure is finalized.

Sign Up for IIMOC × FrontierCS

Support FrontierCS on GitHub Learn about the benchmark

FrontierCS content is used with permission; FrontierCS remains the original source of the tasks.

Where Clubs Compete

Join students from:

USAJapanKorea TaiwanMoroccoCanada EthiopiaUKChina IndiaIranPakistan NetherlandsGermanyVietnam PolandQatarFinland Hong KongEgyptBahrain

2025 Problems

Permutation (Sample)

Author: Qiuyang Mang (Sua)
Edited by: Edwin Chen
Editorial by: Alexander Du
Prepared by: Alexander Du & Edwin Chen

Additional Official Materials

Author: Shang Zhou (Berkeley Sky Computing Lab)
Edited by: Shang Zhou
Editorial by: Shang Zhou
Prepared by: Edwin Chen

IIMOC