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!
The first competition day was the main event of today, which was particularly exciting, as it marked the first time Ryan, Timmy and Tunan sat an IOI exam. One of the things that sets the IOI apart from other olympiads is the existence of a live scoreboard, which is updated in real-time during the competition…
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.
Today marks the official arrivals day for the IOI! Kevin, Donna and I spent a rather eventful morning looking for SIM cards for our phones, while students met and bonded with members of the Croatian team over Uno.
Fidan led us through the Baku Metro, and along a tour of Icherisheher (the old city centre), where we went up the 12th century Maiden Tower and saw an excellent view of Baku.
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.
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.
Getting subtasks was a focus for the whole team, with the risk of push-ups if we missed points we should have gotten. Fortunately, everyone was able to score a good amount of points on all the problems and we were spared from having to do push-ups.
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.
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.
Today was the rest day between the two CEOI days, our rest being a different 5-hour exam… After the exam, we decided to play a bipartite graph version of frisbee, before switching to the even easier cycle graph version, a phenomena Kevin likened to solving subtasks.
And by guessing the great number of 1011337101 I gained the highest score in the sacred blog game, and hence the privilege of writing the blog post for Day 1…
This blog post accounts for the highlights of the IOI team’s first day of training at the pre-departure camp , as told by IOI team member Tunan Shi. Tunan is representing Australia for the first time, at this year’s IOI he is known as the “clutchmaster” of the team, having won a silver medal in
Welcome! Here is a summary of the recent trip to Bath for the 2019 IMO, counting down to The Mathematics Ashes on Day -2, the opening ceremony on Day 0, the first exam on Day 1… and heading home again on Day 7. DAY 9 (Wed 24/7)Home at last. (Or a few more hours in
24 April 2019 This month, four talented Aussie girls represented Australia in the 2019 European Girls Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO) in Kyiv, Ukraine. Our team competed against 196 young women from 49 countries and achieved an outstanding result, winning two silver medals and two honorable mentions for Australia. The team smashed expectations with Australia placing 14th
