Tang Shaoxuan's Perfect IOI Victory | Generated by AI
Question: Who is 唐绍轩 (Tang Shaoxuan) and what is his NOIP/IOI competitive programming story?
Answer:
唐绍轩 (Tang Shaoxuan) is one of China’s most remarkable competitive programmers of the modern era — notable not just for winning gold at IOI 2022, but for achieving a perfect score (600/600, AK — “All Killed”), ranking 1st out of 349 contestants worldwide.
Background
Tang Shaoxuan is from Shandong Pingyi (平邑), and attended Pingyi No. 1 Middle School (平邑第一中学). He began learning computer programming in the sixth grade of primary school, under the guidance of his school’s informatics coach, Liu Minbo (刘闽波).
This is notable because Pingyi is a relatively small, non-elite city — not Beijing, Shanghai, or Hangzhou. Tang Shaoxuan was the first IOI contestant from Shandong province in over a decade, representing a historic “breakthrough of zero” for Shandong informatics. The school had only been running an informatics program for a few years before producing a national team member.
Competition Path
As early as 2020, Tang Shaoxuan — still a junior high school student — participated in the IOI competition and won a silver medal (Category D). In December of that same year, he was selected for the Tsinghua University Informatics Winter Camp and successfully signed a first-tier guaranteed admission contract with Tsinghua University (清华大学签一等约).
That means by the time he was in junior high, he’d already locked in Tsinghua — one of China’s top two universities — through competition merit alone.
IOI 2022 — Perfect Score, World #1
At IOI 2022, the Chinese team swept the top four gold medals. Dai Jiangqi and Tang Shaoxuan both achieved a perfect score of 600 points, tying for 1st place. Zhang Junkai and Zhou Hangrui followed with 555 points each, tying for 3rd.
The official IOI stats confirm: Tang Shaoxuan scored 100/100 on all six tasks, for a total of 600.00 points, placing 1st out of 349 contestants (100th percentile), winning the gold medal.
Getting an AK (perfect score) at IOI is extraordinarily rare. Tang Shaoxuan is named as one of only four Chinese contestants to achieve AK status at IOI in nearly ten years, alongside Deng Mingyang (2021), Dai Jiangqi (2022), and Zhou Kangyang (2024).
Why This Story Is Remarkable
Most IOI gold medalists from China come from elite feeder schools in Nanjing, Hangzhou, or Chengdu with established informatics programs. Tang Shaoxuan is an outlier:
- From a small Shandong county town
- Trained by a local school coach, not a top-tier olympiad training center
- Reached IOI as a junior high student (rare)
- Achieved AK + World #1 at IOI 2022 as a high schooler
- Already committed to Tsinghua two years before graduating
His Codeforces handle is qazswedx2.
References
- IOI Statistics — Shaoxuan Tang
- IOI 2022 Chinese Team Growth Stories — Laitimes
- IOI 2022 China Sweeps Top 4 Gold — Laitimes
- IOI 2022 China Team — Codeforces
- 知乎：IOI 2022 中国队包揽全球前四