Yeah, that was the analogy I had in mind. I wasn't sure if people here would be familiar with it though.

And yeah, I agree that math competition winners wouldn't have the ideal distribution, although it probably wouldn't hurt to recruit from them as well. Also, I may have some bias here, since I never liked competitions and avoided participating in them. But I agree with the points made in that article.

That seems like a good idea, although it's hard to know what the problem space looks like without going there. My intuition says that it would be a good idea to try to have a good amount of diversity in whatever team is chosen.