Top 19 at MIT Informatics Tournament 2025

The Tournament

The MIT Informatics Tournament (MITIT) is an algorithmic programming competition run by MIT. The 2025 High School Division drew 1,200+ contestants globally. Problems range from classic data structures and algorithms to creative mathematical reasoning.

What Made It Hard

MITIT problems aren’t your typical Codeforces problemset. They’re designed by MIT students and often require combining multiple algorithmic ideas in non-obvious ways. A problem might look like graph theory on the surface but require number theory to solve efficiently.

Time pressure is real. You get a fixed window, and the problems are ordered roughly by difficulty — but sometimes the “easy” ones have tricky edge cases that eat your clock.

My Performance

Placing Top 19 out of 1,200+ felt like a breakthrough. Competitive programming has been a steady grind for me — I’m Top 169 in Pakistan on Codeforces, and each contest is an opportunity to push that rating higher. But MITIT was different because the problem style challenged me in ways regular contests don’t.

The problems that went well for me were the ones involving greedy algorithms and graph traversal — areas where I’ve invested the most practice time. The ones I struggled with leaned more into advanced combinatorics, which is an area I’m actively working on.

Advice for High School CP Competitors

Solve problems slightly above your level. If you’re comfortable at 1400 on Codeforces, grind 1600-rated problems. Growth happens at the edge of discomfort.

Learn to read problems carefully. Half my mistakes come from misreading constraints or missing a subtle condition. Slow down on the first read.

Upsolve everything. If you can’t solve a problem during contest, solve it after. That’s where the real learning happens.

The goal for next year: Top 10.