Lijie Chens Path to NOI Gold | Generated by AI
Question: How did Cheng Lijie (Tsinghua and UC Berkeley professor) start with programming, how did he win in NOI, and it seems he was obsessed with games in middle school before suddenly winning in NOI?
Answer:
The person you are referring to is Lijie Chen (陈立杰 in Chinese), an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley’s EECS department (in the Theory Group), previously at Tsinghua University’s Yao Class (a elite CS program), and later a PhD from MIT. He is a prominent researcher in theoretical computer science, especially computational complexity.
Early Start with Programming and Middle School Period
There is no widely documented evidence in public sources that Lijie Chen was particularly “obsessed with games” during middle school in a way that delayed his competitive programming start. Many Chinese OI (Olympiad in Informatics) participants begin programming relatively late compared to other fields — often in junior high (middle school) or even early high school — because NOI/IOI training is intense and usually starts seriously around ages 13–15.
Lijie Chen was born in 1995. He won a gold medal at the National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) in 2012 at the age of 16 (or 17 depending on the exact month), which directly qualified him for recommendation admission (保送) to Tsinghua University without needing the Gaokao. He entered Tsinghua’s Yao Class (Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences) in 2013.
Like many top NOI performers, he likely began learning programming (typically in Pascal or C++) during junior high or the start of high school, then dedicated significant time to algorithmic problem-solving, data structures, graph theory, dynamic programming, etc. — the core of NOI training. There are no public interviews or biographies (as of available sources) describing a dramatic “obsession with games → sudden switch → instant win” story for him specifically. That kind of narrative sometimes appears for other OI legends, but for Lijie Chen, his path appears to be a more conventional (though extremely high-achieving) early start in competitive programming leading to NOI success.
How He Won NOI
Winning NOI gold (especially in a strong year) requires:
- Extremely strong algorithmic thinking and implementation speed under time pressure (5-hour contest, usually 3–4 problems).
- Mastery of advanced topics: advanced graph algorithms, string algorithms, computational geometry, number theory, dynamic programming optimizations, etc.
- Years of training: solving thousands of problems on platforms like Luogu, Codeforces (though Codeforces became popular later), and past NOI/IOI/NOI Winter Camp problems.
- Participation in selection camps: NOI gold medalists usually come from strong provincial teams and perform well in the NOI Winter/Summer camps or CTSC/C NOI series.
Lijie Chen’s NOI 2012 gold medal performance allowed direct entry to Tsinghua Yao Class at 16, marking him as one of the top talents of his year. From there, he continued excelling: strong academic record at Tsinghua, PhD at MIT (advised by a leading theorist), faculty position at UC Berkeley by age ~30, and later joined OpenAI in a research role focused on mathematical reasoning (as of 2026 reports).
His story is more one of consistent excellence in theory/algorithms from high school onward rather than a “sudden” turnaround from gaming.
References:
- Lijie Chen’s personal website
- UC Berkeley EECS faculty page
- 36Kr article on his NOI and Tsinghua admission
- 36Kr article on his career including OpenAI
- His CV (PDF)