Monday the 18th: Training Day 3
Nothing extraordinary happened at breakfast, again. The morning's exam was an interesting combination of a Dynamic Programming problem, a Combinatorics problem that wasn't actually combinatorics once you looked at it closely, and a really really interesting problem that turned out to have some extraordinarily elegant solution.
Informatics is somewhat of an art in ignoring common sense and making something trivial sound really, really weird:
"While you didn't have enough, keep substituting ceilings for floors until satisfied"
That, more or less, is a quote from the solution to the last problem.
I spent the rest of the night trying to salvage Robert's hard drive, but we had no luck in opening his laptop's cover. It is held in place by screws that will not budge under the pressure of skilful ruler-as-a-screwdriver application.
Tuesday the 19th: Training Day 4
Today we had a B-Session, a strange kind of an exam that is not really a true informatics exam.
On Sunday night, we were given a problem "Tree Mirroring" that we knew we would have to solve today. We spent a day or so thinking about it prior to walking into the tutorial room in the morning, ready to attack the question and hopefully solve it.
The process of solving it consisted of a few hours of discussion, after which we got enough observations and insights into the problem to solve it completely. We then went into the labs to code it up, and it took a far while for everyone to realise that we forgot a crucial part of the algorithm - something that will break things in quite a few ways. It is the same problem that I ran across during day 2 of the IOI - scroll down for the information on that.
I don't really remember what happened after that, so I'll skip immediately to the flight.
Thursday the 21st: The flight
After waking up really early in the morning to get our breakfast over and done with, and catch a cab to the airport, we once again found the breakfast place closed. We ended up packing our food in a paper bag and eating it on the way to the airport, inconspicuously, so that the cab driver won't see us at it :D
Before take-off, we flicked through the in-flight entertainment system's channels and found a camera that is attached to the bottom of the plane and effectively shows the runway in front of us. It was awesome.
I spent most of the flight watching movies (Sucker Punch, The Eagle, and something else that I can't remember - some family comedy), and sleeping in the last hour or so. Others did pretty much the same, with an addition of Tetris tournaments against each other.
After 9.5 hours of flight, we landed in Bangkok and caught a train to the hotel. My room was quite spacious with a surprisingly nice view on the front of the airport. Unlike last year, I did not run across any members of the Russian team in the hotel.
Night-time Thailand is exciting!
Friday the 22nd: Bus ride and arrivals
We caught a bus to Pattaya; the total ride was about 2 hours long. During that, there were 2 vaguely amusing things:
- The nonogram puzzle on the IOI newsletter was invalid - we did it twice, getting the same result, and then Bernard told us that it is horribly broken. Oh well.
- Thai KFC charge extra for "no ice" in your drink. Want to know why? Click here.
When we arrived to the Royal Cliff Beach Hotel, the place where we are staying, a glass of really nice cranberry juice was forced into my hands by really friendly and yet determined waiters. We soon left for our rooms, and then went down to meet other teams. There were quite a few people that I recognised from last 2 years, but there also were many new competitors who didn't have any idea of what was going on.
-- I will type up the rest of the IOI days later, I've been at this for an hour or so now.
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