The Young Physicists` Tournament is a conference for students, which originated in 80` in Moscow. The Moscow state university started to prepare a set of open problems from different topics from physics, which has to be solved by groups of students. After several months of preparation, the students met together and presented their solutions. They had not only to be prepared to present any one of the problems, but they had also to oppose the presentation of other students. An independent "jury" consisting of professors and academicians decided about the best groups of students.
Becoming more popular, this meetings, excitingly called Physics tournaments, spread out across the former Soviet Union and Central European countries. After the changes in 1989, also western countries started to participate in this meetings.
By now the organization has a long tradition and participants coming from all over the world. Starting from Australia and South Korea, through NIS and EU member states, Kenya to Brazil to USA. The rules for presentation of the results, opposition, reviewing and judgment by the independent jury are fixed in the statutes of IYPT and Regulations of IYPT. Both can be found on the webpage www.iypt.org.
During the last decade, the meeting was organized by different countries. Some of them (as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus) are the former Soviet Union states, others like Poland, Czech republic and Hungary were still on the east side of the former barrier. Also Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden had the opportunity to organize this meeting. For 2006, when IYPT will be held in Bratislava, we plan with cca. 26 participating countries. Every country is participating with five students, one leader of the group, one national member of the jury and one member of the International organizing committee.
Since 2000 the number of participating countries grew up dramatically (more than twice). Contrary to a rather small event for less than 100 participants, now we have to be prepared for up to 300 people. Costs connected with such an action, especially lodging and allowance costs grow very rapidly and it is not possible to carry it out solely by the host country. In 2004 the local organizers started to collect a rather symbolic registration fee of 400 EUR, which grew up to 500 EUR in 2005.
