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Australian Maths Trust

Timmy’s birthday

This blog post accounts for the highlights of the IOI team’s sixth (and penultimate) day of training at the pre-departure camp, as told by IOI Reserve team member, Junhua Chen.

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 [Ed. tutor and Australian IOI legend] Ray Li, who came to pass along some words of wisdom regarding how to handle big exams.

We ate while Josh, Kevin and Ray gave us a series of rapid-fire data structures problems, where they stated a problem and we had to describe one or more data structures that efficiently solved the given problem. Here is an example problem that we did, solvable with a simple segment tree.

Given an list of numbers, support the following operations:

– Change one of the given numbers
– Calculate the sum of a contiguous range of numbers in the list.

Over the past week, we have slowly improved our frisbee skills, and being our last full afternoon, we played a highly competitive [Ed. yet very friendly!] game of Ultimate Frisbee.

After that, we discussed today’s problems in the usual problem session, before being treated to a surprise paper of AMC (Australian Mathematics Competition). Unfortunately, we were all caught up in some off by one errors but doing it online for the first time was pretty fun!

Ray (R) expounding on exam technique

Dinner was at the traditional last night curry place [Ed. a throwback to last year], where we were too caught up in eating naan to play the game to decide the next blog writer, but that is not my job.

One noteworthy event today was Timmy’s 18th birthday, and what a way to spend it too! Below is a picture of him and his cake!

That pretty much ends my involvement in this IOI camp, as I will be flying out tomorrow afternoon. Good luck to Tunan, Ryan, Timmy and Angus in IOI and I hope they see much green in the contest environments in the land of fire! See you all later!