Creating informatics olympiad tasks: Exploring the black art

Each year a wealth of informatics olympiads are held worldwide at national, regional and international levels, all of which require engaging and challenging tasks that have not been seen before. Nevertheless, creating high quality tasks can be a difficult and time-consuming process. In this paper we explore some of the different techniques that problem setters can use to find new ideas for tasks and refine these ideas into problems suitable for an informatics olympiad. These techniques are illustrated through concrete examples from a variety of contests.