It's Sunday, Sunday, gotta blogpost on Sunday.

Typing this post up on my phone just because I can. Let's see how this goes.

Yesterday was the first day of the training camp, and we started out with a pretty awesome breakfast followed by a less awesome exam. Finding the cafe place closed didn't dampen our spirits, as we voted on eating Michael for breakfast instead - democracy wins again. Luckily for him, the cafe opened just in time to save Michael's life.

The exam was a pretty interesting combination of problems, somewhat easier than what I expected. I managed to complete the exam in 4 hours (after chasing down a single mistake in my code for a good hour or so) with a perfect score. If only I could do that in the IOI...

After that, we went for a lunch and went through the exam problems. Nothing exciting, really. Seeing all the different approaches to the problems that the others had was quite an interesting experience, and it's what makes informatics pretty much unique in comparison with other Olympiad fields.

Today, we followed the same schedule as before, minus the breakfast incident. The exam looked heaps harder, too. I completely misjudged 2 of the easier problems as being too hard, and in fact one of them had a very elegant solution that no one managed to see. I decided to spend lots and lots of time on a harder problem, and ended up getting 80% for it. Not too bad, but not the best exam practice: could have scored 100+50+33 instead of 33+80.

After the problm session, we returned to the Lodge to play a Zendo, a pattern-finding game. Someone makes up a rule about what constitutes a valid arrangement of playing pieces, and the others try to work it out by making their own designs and asking the "game master" whether it is valid. Even though it sounds simple, we spent a good hour or 2 trying to guess Chris's rule.

We also got a problem to think about, we have a day and a bit to solve it, and then we will have an exam where we have to code up if solutions and ideally score 100. But it's late now, so... should sleep before the exam.

Typing on a phone isn't that bad after all, just slow.