It's been an intensive week of training, and today marked our second last practice exam - which means the IOI is but days away. Our exam featured 3 problems. In typical format, one of the included problems was very difficult to work through and implement, but teamwork after each exam has managed to break down everything we've faced. We've been given devious problems in our training (putting together various constraints on a grid was yesterday's 5-hour task), and it's amazing how far in knowledge and ability everyone can progress in a year.
Everyone's looking forward to the IOI, and there's only a few days left until we're off to exotic Brisbane.
Thursday, 4 July 2013
Exam mornings and Free afternoons
For our third day we had our B-Session where we get a problem and discuss it as a group to find the algorithm with helpful pushes from our tutors. However, the only catch is that even knowing the algorithm, it can be really hard to code up, even when given a few hours, and not all of us were able to solve it :(
And after that, we had time off for ourselves in our free afternoon. Now, what do you do with 8 people and a free afternoon? Well firstly, you realise that someone needs to go shopping for supplies, another takes a nap (?), and you have no idea where the 6th person has gone, so you play 4 player card games with 5 people, which works...somehow. Mind you, it was still quite fun, and we were able to kill 3 hours with two games of 500 and one of spades.
We then had a filling dinner at a place called "It's T!me for Thai" (no points for guessing the type of food served), where everyone bandwagoned with the coconut juice, and official team leader Jarrah had to make sure on the amount of spring rolls received (because 3 servings of 4 is somehow interpreted as 3 rolls). We are also still waiting for our salt and pepper tofu...
And after that, we had time off for ourselves in our free afternoon. Now, what do you do with 8 people and a free afternoon? Well firstly, you realise that someone needs to go shopping for supplies, another takes a nap (?), and you have no idea where the 6th person has gone, so you play 4 player card games with 5 people, which works...somehow. Mind you, it was still quite fun, and we were able to kill 3 hours with two games of 500 and one of spades.
We then had a filling dinner at a place called "It's T!me for Thai" (no points for guessing the type of food served), where everyone bandwagoned with the coconut juice, and official team leader Jarrah had to make sure on the amount of spring rolls received (because 3 servings of 4 is somehow interpreted as 3 rolls). We are also still waiting for our salt and pepper tofu...
Australia's IOI Teams: Now Available with Smiles :)
The Australian teams have had a successful photo shoot today. It turns out the secret to getting people to smile for photos is to get them to repeat: "Hi my name is Manny the martian, my favourite flavour of bowling ball is strawberry".
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| James Payor |
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| Adrian Goldwaser |
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| Austin Tankiang |
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| Nicholas Laver |
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| Ishraq Huda |
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| Michael Chen |
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| Ray Li |
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| Joshua Lau |
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| Team A Leader: Jarrah Lacko |
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| Team B Leader: Luke Harrison |
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| Team B Deputy Leader: Ben Stott |
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| Team A Deputy Leader: Robert Newey |
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| Team B |
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| Team A |
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| Everyone |
Tuesday, 2 July 2013
[Caps Lock] [Bold] [Italics] [Underline] Controversial Title
A subset of us having been forced to write a blog post based on purely democratic rock paper scissors, I will now inform you of stuff that's happening. (Probably for the fourth(-ish) time taking into consideration that half of us have to do this and I'm slow.)
As Ishraq [reference to team mate to demonstrate budding friendship and teamwork and stuff] suggests I will describe how the most approachable of tutors revealed to us the wonders of competitive strategic tire changing (aka. car racing). You see, not only did he elucidate on the importance of speed in the pit, he also expounded upon the tactical consequence of the safety car and how imperative the conservation of the tire was in the endeavour for victory.
Anyway, hopefully that scared you off, or you just left after the post before me because reading is hard. Otherwise, in a fit of boredom we had a TypeRace yesterday. Some may call this sad. I say we were typing fast and if that's sad then okay.
Also, apparently people like reading about food on blogs. We ate at Golden Tower yesterday. Wait, sorry: "New Golden Tower". It's was pretty New and exciting. The waitress seemed pretty inexperienced though... Walks in, puts down dish, walks away. Suddenly you have 12 confused customers wondering what the dish was.
PS: I just realised that me being slow means that more people will read my post. Stuilly LIFO.
[1]: http://thesaurus.com/browse/explain?s=t
[2]: http://thesaurus.com/browse/importance?s=t
As Ishraq [reference to team mate to demonstrate budding friendship and teamwork and stuff] suggests I will describe how the most approachable of tutors revealed to us the wonders of competitive strategic tire changing (aka. car racing). You see, not only did he elucidate on the importance of speed in the pit, he also expounded upon the tactical consequence of the safety car and how imperative the conservation of the tire was in the endeavour for victory.
Anyway, hopefully that scared you off, or you just left after the post before me because reading is hard. Otherwise, in a fit of boredom we had a TypeRace yesterday. Some may call this sad. I say we were typing fast and if that's sad then okay.
Also, apparently people like reading about food on blogs. We ate at Golden Tower yesterday. Wait, sorry: "New Golden Tower". It's was pretty New and exciting. The waitress seemed pretty inexperienced though... Walks in, puts down dish, walks away. Suddenly you have 12 confused customers wondering what the dish was.
PS: I just realised that me being slow means that more people will read my post. S
[1]: http://thesaurus.com/browse/explain?s=t
[2]: http://thesaurus.com/browse/importance?s=t
OMG Informatics
I often struggle at writing introductory paragraphs. This is the end of my introductory paragraph.
By far, the most important part of the day is breakfast, and it only makes sense to start with that. I had toast, eggs, baked beans and coco pops. It was pretty swell.
Then came the daily exam, which featured the tasks of day 2 of the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics (we did day 1 yesterday). According to Jarrah, the scores we achieved were all medal-winning scores, which is promising.
Then came lunch. I used the AMT free money to get chicken and chips from the UNSW food court. It was pretty swell.
Then came the problem session, where we discussed the problems from today's exam. Some of the solutions were pretty crazy, particularly the solution to the last question.
And just now I discovered something ~AMAZING~. Scanf is really, really slow. Like stupidly slow. Like one of my solutions to a particular problem was timing out. This is because scanf assumes you're in a multi-threaded environment, so it has to wait for the input stream to be readable and put a lock on it and whatnot. This is silly, because in informatics we aren't allowed to use multiple threads. What we use instead is a super cool function called getchar_unlocked. It doesn't wait for threads or put locks on things. It just reads in a character like a boss. This took a particular case from 0.5s to 0.2s, which is pretty swell.
And now we are about to have pizza for dinner. It should be pretty swell.
By far, the most important part of the day is breakfast, and it only makes sense to start with that. I had toast, eggs, baked beans and coco pops. It was pretty swell.
Then came the daily exam, which featured the tasks of day 2 of the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics (we did day 1 yesterday). According to Jarrah, the scores we achieved were all medal-winning scores, which is promising.
Then came lunch. I used the AMT free money to get chicken and chips from the UNSW food court. It was pretty swell.
Then came the problem session, where we discussed the problems from today's exam. Some of the solutions were pretty crazy, particularly the solution to the last question.
And just now I discovered something ~AMAZING~. Scanf is really, really slow. Like stupidly slow. Like one of my solutions to a particular problem was timing out. This is because scanf assumes you're in a multi-threaded environment, so it has to wait for the input stream to be readable and put a lock on it and whatnot. This is silly, because in informatics we aren't allowed to use multiple threads. What we use instead is a super cool function called getchar_unlocked. It doesn't wait for threads or put locks on things. It just reads in a character like a boss. This took a particular case from 0.5s to 0.2s, which is pretty swell.
And now we are about to have pizza for dinner. It should be pretty swell.
"I'm going on an adventure!"
And thus the adventures of the Australian IOI team(s) begin for another year. Leaving everything behind, we through ourselves into the recesses of UNSW for an intense week of blood, sweat and tears training. After wrestling with the two days of [competition name redacted] (we're not supposed to know which one) we were *thrilled* to find out we all would've won medals... YAY!.
Following oohing and ahhing at the photos for the IOI 2013 teams (see http://www.ioi2013.org/competition/teams/) we are now busy writing blog posts such as the one which you now read.
Tomorrow theterrors thrills of a B-Session awaits where we must painstakingly implement a solution to a problem pivotal to the future of humankind *nodnod*.
We look forward to the perilous journey to the exotic Brisbane (that seems to be the adjective of the season) in 4 days' time where we will meet and compete against the top high school computer scientists in the world. It will truly be an adventure!
[kudos if you get the titular reference].
Following oohing and ahhing at the photos for the IOI 2013 teams (see http://www.ioi2013.org/competition/teams/) we are now busy writing blog posts such as the one which you now read.
Tomorrow the
We look forward to the perilous journey to the exotic Brisbane (that seems to be the adjective of the season) in 4 days' time where we will meet and compete against the top high school computer scientists in the world. It will truly be an adventure!
[kudos if you get the titular reference].
Blog Post
Apparently I have to blog cause else people will be sad. And apparently we don't like people being sad. But everyone else has already blog posted so I don't know if my post will make anyone else less sad.
So today we had an exam that was totally not BOI Day 2. (PS: Yesterday totally wasn't BOI Day 1). The questions involved informatics which was scary. However it was fun. Therefore it wasn't scary. The questions were interesting like yesterdays. 2 questions weren't too bad so there was only one question and it didn't look too bad. But it was really saddening and at the end everyone sad. Also apparently all of us got medals with multiple golds if it was actual BOI so everyone's happy again.
One of the happiest problems was a simplified version of investigating the forest tracks of 2 types of animals. It was mainly interesting because you could see how this problem could be relevant in real life (whatever that is). The problem itself however wasn't too hard and involved some basic graph theory with one or two observations on top. Its interesting though, how much can be achieved with just a non-sentient, idiot box and thinking. So many problems can be solved essentially by telling an idiot box some observations. Well, at least as long as the world is 2d and spaced out in squares. Which is pretty cool.
Also we got to eat cause we weren't really bad. So that was fun. And I think my word count indicates I should be done. And if you're actually still reading, I have no idea what you're doing. I'll just make it easy for you and end my post in the middle of a sen-
So today we had an exam that was totally not BOI Day 2. (PS: Yesterday totally wasn't BOI Day 1). The questions involved informatics which was scary. However it was fun. Therefore it wasn't scary. The questions were interesting like yesterdays. 2 questions weren't too bad so there was only one question and it didn't look too bad. But it was really saddening and at the end everyone sad. Also apparently all of us got medals with multiple golds if it was actual BOI so everyone's happy again.
One of the happiest problems was a simplified version of investigating the forest tracks of 2 types of animals. It was mainly interesting because you could see how this problem could be relevant in real life (whatever that is). The problem itself however wasn't too hard and involved some basic graph theory with one or two observations on top. Its interesting though, how much can be achieved with just a non-sentient, idiot box and thinking. So many problems can be solved essentially by telling an idiot box some observations. Well, at least as long as the world is 2d and spaced out in squares. Which is pretty cool.
Also we got to eat cause we weren't really bad. So that was fun. And I think my word count indicates I should be done. And if you're actually still reading, I have no idea what you're doing. I'll just make it easy for you and end my post in the middle of a sen-
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