Top student competes with world’s best in artificial intelligence challenge
A top student proved to have the golden touch when it came to understanding artificial intelligence as he competed against the best minds in the world.
Xingzhi Lui, a student at Concord College, Acton Burnell, near Shrewsbury, was awarded a gold medal certificate of achievement after representing the UK in the International AI Olympiad in Slovenia.
The 18-year-old came seventh overall in the world and top in one section of the prestigious competition.
The International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence is a high-level competition for students, featuring individual and team challenges that test their skills in AI theory, learning and data analysis. Participants are asked to solve complex tasks focusing on natural language processing, computer vision and robotics.
Xingzhi, who has been offered a place at Cambridge University, sat the first round of the UK team selection last year. He was selected in January but only told he was going in February two weeks before he was due to leave for Slovenia and his visa was approved just two days before.
The competition was split into two days, the first day for examining theoretical AI knowledge, testing whether he understood the key AI algorithms.
He said: “I did really well in this round, in fact, I scored the highest score in the theoretical scientific round from all contestants, being awarded 61 out of 62.”
The second day saw him creating an AI model to solve a task, with the contestants scored on how well their model performed when tackling unseen data and when deployed in real-life.
“I was quite surprised that I got gold in the end,” he said. “But I was very pleased especially as I was actually the only gold medallist who scored higher in the scientific round than the practical.
“I had a great time meeting and talking to other contestants there and enjoyed touring the city of Ljubljana, including historical landmarks such as the Ljubljana Castle. What was cool was that the river that runs through Ljubljana is actually the geographical barrier separating the Balkan Peninsula and Central Europe, so I technically went to both parts of Europe simultaneously. Overall, the competition experience was great.”
Xingzhi has also just taken part in the final round of the 2025/26 British Algorithmic Olympiad.