International
Online
Physics Competition
Thank you for 15 years of support.
Announcement of the End of Physics Brawl Online
Dear participants, teachers, and physics enthusiasts,
After fifteen years, we are saying goodbye to Physics Brawl Online.
This was not an easy decision. Today, artificial intelligence tools are able to solve our competition problems at a level comparable to that of high-school students, or better. As these tools continue to develop, the online competition in its current form is losing its purpose. We do not want Physics Brawl Online to become a prompting competition, nor do we want honest participants to lose motivation because they see others around them cheating.
More than a year ago, we sent out questionnaires to you and discussed various ways to keep the competition going under these circumstances. After long discussions, we addressed the situation transparently, introduced changes to the rules, and, among other things, held video calls with selected teams to verify their solutions. However, in the 2025 contest, after a thorough investigation, we disqualified 175 teams, and we have reasonable grounds to suspect that many others used AI as well, although we are unable to prove it. Although we do not wish to disclose all the methods we used to investigate cheating, we consider it important to emphasize that we devoted considerable effort to detecting dishonest behaviour: we carefully reviewed patterns of behaviour by hand and gathered evidence for hundreds of teams. In the end, however, we came to the conclusion that even the measures we had introduced were not enough, and that most of the other proposed solutions would either be almost technically impossible to implement or would go against the fundamental idea of the competition: to make physics accessible to everyone who is interested.
Over the fifteen years of its existence, Physics Brawl Online grew into the largest event of its kind in the world. In its most successful year, 1,574 teams from 81 countries took part. More than once, we encountered someone who knew FYKOS, or even the Czech Republic, precisely and only because of this competition. For us as organizers, this was an immensely humbling and beautiful experience, and it taught us a great deal – from unifying conditions for school systems across the world to the technical challenges of thousands of devices connecting at the same time. For all of this, we owe our thanks above all to you: the participants, teachers, and all generations of organizers who gradually built the competition and shaped it into what it is today.
That is why we want to bring it to a close with dignity and with our heads held high. This step will also allow us to focus our efforts on our other activities. The archive of competition problems from previous years will remain available on the website. And who knows – perhaps one day Physics Brawl Online will return in a new form.
Thank you to everyone who made Physics Brawl Online a phenomenon. We look forward to meeting you again somewhere else.
On behalf of the entire organizing team,
of Physics Brawl Online