First day of IOI training. Time dedicated to readying ourselves for the 22nd IOI in Waterloo, Canada. Scheduled to check into our lodgings at Perouse Lodge at 2pm, I skilfully manage to turn up at 4pm after a mad morning trying to gather my stuff for the trip. Checking in, I dump my belongings into my room, seeing Evgeny's netbook charging on the table and his trademark cans of Mother sitting on the bed-side table (on his side, of course). By this time, the rest of the team and our glorious leaders had already left for the UNSW CSE building to begin training.
I rush down to the CSE building (K-17), call Bernard to lead me to the rest of the group. Soon enough, I'm on the 2nd floor, sitting at a table with the rest of the team having entirely missed the entire discussion. Apparently the discussion that I had missed was focused entirely around a particular informatics problem, Islands from the 2008 IOI. It seemed that everyone had explored the problem in great depth and arrived at a completed solution for the problem. Fortunately for me, I had already sat through a problem session focused around Islands at a previous camp, so I hadn't missed out on terribly much. As soon as I had arrived, every one was packing up to head off to the labs, psyched up and ready to do some hardcore coding.
We gathered around in a nice shiny CSE lab, ready to implement our solution to Islands. Logging in, I pull out my less-than-trusty pen and paper, trying to recall the solution that I had once had known. Minutes later, I had written out a half-page of pseudocode to guide me through my approaching frenzy of coding. A couple hours later, I was staring at the 200 or so lines of code that I had splattered across my screen. It had made so much sense in my mind and on my paper, but when I finally came around to the implementation stage, I had hit what one may call a few "implementation details". A while later, after having moved to another lab having been "forced" out of our original one (due to some automatic system), I found myself staring at the same piece of code, still completely lost as to the nature of my error. Ultimately, we ended up bailing for food before I had gotten any closer to a solution.
Wandering back to our lodgings to dump any unwanted weight, we executed a brief search of the nearby vicinity to find a Turkish pizza/pide place. We all sat down, talked a bit, talked a bit more, looked at our menus awkwardly, talked yet some more, forced the waiter to wait a little more while we decided on our orders, talked a bit more, looked awkwardly at our menus for a bit longer, talked one last time before finally ordering. Everything we ordered was "special" in some way (according to the menu) (Chef's Special, Chicken Special, Spot Special, Meat Special and some other Special). Apparently the Chicken Special (which Luke and I ordered) was some kind of a elongated pizza, while everyone else's orders were pides. A good meal to seal off a frantic day.
After eating, we talked more about the world of informatics, what Canada would be like, as well as what various past IOIs were like. Fascinating discussion that somehow warped into me and Luke talking about our trial HSC exams (which will be suspended for us while we're at the IOI) and about the education system of NSW and the national curriculum. This then went onto politics and other topics which I don't recall. Somewhere in the converse, Bernard brought up how it was about time the informatics team start a blog, hence this blog post.
I really don't know what I'm meant to be putting in this blog post. Hopefully this post makes as much sense (and doesn't sound as ridiculous) as it originally did in my head.
All in all, it's been a fine day of training (even though I was missing for most of it) and I'm getting pumped up for the IOI.
[gosh, long blog post]
Also, if anyone is wondering, I don't normally communicate like this (ie. the bizarre vernacular)
-ken
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