"Bioinformatics is an emerging field at the intersection of molecular biology, computer science and mathematics. As our knowledge in molecular biology grows, the more access we have to experimental data, the larger these datasets and genetic databases are, the more fine tuned and sophisticated algorithms are needed to analyze them.

I find such contests are extremely useful to attract those people who have the background in the past two but have very little knowledge about biology in general. As a person with Math and CS background, I found truly fascinating how classical graph or string algorithms have revived in this new environment and bioinformatics is also a discipline that uses cutting edge algorithmic techniques in order to cope with the growing size of the problems.

For students these problems could serve as a good demonstration that computational complexity does matter in real life, and sometimes even a linear algorithm is not suitable for a problem. In this contest the participants had the opportunity to implement and optimize the algorithms that actually solve real problems, this is the most important aspect. I really enjoyed it, see you next year! "