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Australian Maths Trust

Camels and Horses

With the competition done and dusted, today was the second full excursion day of this IOI. Off to a late start – due to the weather (though I reckon everyone could have done with it anyway), the leaders visited a 12th century historic village (called Qala). This village was an archaeological site, with many ancient relics, and reconstructions of historic houses.

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On a roll

It was fascinating to see exhibitions of how traditional Azerbaijani carpets have been hand-woven throughout the centuries: our guide insisted that no authentic Azerbaijani carpet is ever woven by machine. In particular, we were told that an experienced craftsperson can only weave 5cm of length of these carpets in a single day!

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#practice #snack #koala

Students tested mundane things such as the support for C++ language features and feedback given by the system, to the more practical, such as timing how long it takes to receive a printout, how long it takes to be escorted to / from the bathroom, and evaluating the tastiness of the snacks that can be ordered through the competition system.

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Departure

The wait at the airport saw the team attempting to maximise the volume of water collected from the faulty tap near gate 10. We also enjoyed Kevin’s amazing commentary on touchscreen air hockey played by two toddlers. It was a true shame that I forgot to take a video of that despite being the keeper of the GoPro.

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Timmy’s birthday

Today is my last full day with the IOI team, and what a week it has been. Following a five hour exam where I saw my first splash of the elusive CMS green colour (indicating that we had gotten a full score of 100 on a problem), we went to a nice Cuban cafe where we were joined by Ray Li, who came to pass along some words of wisdom regarding how to handle big exams.

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Black or Cyan?

Tonight’s game was based off of the first question of today’s exam — given a rectangular grid of squares coloured either black or cyan, find an arrangement using the least number of non-overlapping rectangles which covers all cyan squares and doesn’t cover any black squares.

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Wet, Wet, Wet

CEOI day 2 was the trial exam for today. The problems were interesting and more difficult than those in the previous trial exams. After the trial exam we, had our customary frisbee session. This time, we had a person in the middle of the cycle / circle trying to fail the others and replace them.

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