Alas, we begin

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

Day 0

Today was reasonably productive in terms of actually doing stuff. After arriving, we headed down to UNSW seminar rooms to start looking at some problems. I ended up solving one, but the sense of achievement faded after spending more than 3 hours attempting to actually program it in the labs. After leaving frustrated and incredibly hungry, with the long walk back to the hotel only serving to increase this feeling, I was really looking forward to dinner.

The dinner tonight was Turkish, which was actually pretty nice, considering I had no clue what type of food it was before trying it. I had a kind of pizza/garlic bread thing, which was pretty good. After dinner we went back to our rooms, to rest...

T-134 hours

Waking up at 6:50 in the morning, I reset my alarm which was set to 7:00 for some strange and unknown reason, and went to sleep for 2 more hours. All in all, that was a great start to an intense training week.

After packing up, travel to Randwick and checking in at Perouse Lodge with 40 minutes to spare, I checked if there are any reasonable wireless networks around (naturally). Luckily, the one provided by the hotel is enough to check my emails and access the training site.

First session of pre-IOI training threw me straight back into the problem-solving mindset. We spent a couple of hours solving a past IOI problem, Islands, and waiting for Kenneth to turn up (2 hours late, again). We then headed off to the labs to code up our solutions, and no one got anywhere close to getting full marks on the problem.

We topped off our day with a trip to a Turkish restaurant and a good friendly game of xscorch, accompanied by the duet performance of Les Mis by Kenneth and my laptop.

day 1 v2

And so ends day 1, v2 of the 2010 IOI.

I traveled down yesterday since there is no possible way to get from Cobar to Sydney for a 2pm start. For me travelling consisted of a 3 hour bus ride to Dubbo, then a flight to Sydney, making for an 8 hour trip. The stop over in Dubbo was extremely useful for stocking up on supplies, like travel adaptors for such wonderful places as Canada. Also the taxi trip out to the airport was possibly the most optimal drive possible, by the end we were talking about time travel and special relativity.

Last night I had dinner with Jarrah, Bernard and his wife at quite an interesting chinese restaurant near UNSW. I have never seen so many melons in one fridge! We got there eventually after figuring out how to use the boot (we're informaticians, not drivers). Unfortunately I was under instructions to not get hospitalised or arrested.

This morning I had a wonderful breakfast at the cafe next to the hotel (since then I have been given breakfast vouchers). The bacon and egg roll had half a pig on it!

I met up with the rest of the IOI team at 2pm, from there we went to UNSW for a problem solving session. We solved a problem from the Egyptian IOI involving bridges, ferries and lots of walking, it boiled down in to a set of cactus/vortex graphs.

Training Day 0: Check-in

Here begins the blog of Australian 2010 IOI team, as we journey to Canada to compete in the International Olympiad in Informatics - the world's premiere high-school programming competition.

Today was day 0 of some intensive pre-IOI training. Several hours of hard problem solving, followed by a several more hours of difficult coding, just to get the team into the swing of it! Each of the following days will kick off at the ridiculous time of 8:30am with a 5 hour exam. It's not going to be pleasant, but getting up early at the IOI will hurt just as much.