Okay, I guess it was really naïve of me to suppose that I could get any considerable amount of blogging done before the IOI ended. Onward…

We left off at the end of the practice session. As if somebody were taking revenge against us for not having to suffer through any airplane trips, we were served a cold airplane meal for lunch.

Seriously, the box had a sticker that noted its manufacturer as something something Air Kitchen and another translucent sticker that badly covered an inscription saying the same thing in much bigger letters. It contained a cold apple salad, a cold chicken bun, a cold flat plastic cylinder of orange juice, and a package of plastic utensils that was exactly like the utensils that came with every airplane meal ever. I was disappointed, but at least the salad tasted okay, and I ate an extra one because two of my teammates volunteered theirs.

To pass the time, we played an extra-evil ninety-nine variant. Apparently this is a very Taiwanese game because lots of student guides were teaching their teams the game, although our special cards differ from the ones Wikipedia lists in a lot of ways and our evil variant created more opportunity for sabotage and counter-sabotage and bluffing. 7s are used to draw your replacement card from somebody else’s hand, and that person cannot draw again and will have one less card; aces are used to swap your entire hand with somebody else, who also cannot draw a card; small-value cards can be combined to form special values (e.g. play a 2 and 5 for the effect of a 7) but after playing a combination you can only draw one replacement card; and later, to speed up the game, we added a rule where all 9s had to be unconditionally discarded without replacement but would still get shuffled back into the draw pile. Players lose if it’s their turn and they have no playable cards, including no cards at all.

While we were playing and repeatedly reveling in everybody ganging up to beat the winner from the last round, an instrumental version of “You Are My Sunshine” played on repeat in the background for literally the entire time. It wasn’t a very good version either. If you didn’t listen carefully for the fade-out and few seconds of silence at the end of each loop, you’d think that the loop was only one verse long.

Late post. As usual.

It started with an online competition — write programs, solve problems, get points. I wouldn’t call the problems easy, but they weren’t hard either. So I solved all of them. To make it even less impressive, only about twenty people submitted anything at all.

But the result was just what it was: I ended up with a free ticket to PyCon APAC 2014.

I’d prefer a conference about a more functional programming language, but I’ll take what I get. Another adventure!

After the first stage of selection camp, I was very nervous because I was fifth place in a selection sequence that would finally result in a team of four.

I screwed myself over on the first mock test by committing to a bad implementation method on a problem that was hard to get points on. My method seemed simple, but the memory usage leaked out in a way that was confusing and hard to patch; unfortunately, I tried to patch it in increasingly desperate and convoluted ways rather than scrapping the method, and thus missed out on many of the points elsewhere.

During the second test I failed to read the last problem carefully and spent too much of my time on the second problem, once again missing out on a lot of relatively easy points. I had optimized and optimized and pushed my quadratic runtime down to linearithmic, which would allow me to get the points for the last subtask — or so I thought. But with 10 minutes left I had all but one testcase right, and after desperately rereading my code, I realized that I had a string comparison stuck in an inner loop that could make my runtime degenerate to quadratic if the input string had lots of the same digit. In order to have a solidly linearithmic algorithm, I would have to implement a suffix array. Ten minutes? I gave up. (The problem setters told me afterwards that hashing would have worked too; I didn’t think of that at all. Oops.) I spent the 10 minutes reading the last problem and still failed to read it carefully. So that did not go very well.

But, as the title probably gave away, during the third and fourth mock tests everything went much better than expected. :)

Random video! Although I feel that I’ve heard it earlier, my first conscious memory of getting linked to it is from this post. At first I thought it would be the right background music for this post, but upon further reflection I think it mainly suited me while I was writing this post. Well, it’s topical if you mentally replace “day” with “year”.

Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I paused my participation in big high-school competitions, for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, I stopped attempting to make IMO both because I wouldn’t get that much from the training and because other people ought to have the opportunity. I was concerned that I might condition myself to only be able to do math with the short-term motivation of contests. Better to focus on college math and maybe some original research, I thought. During the year, I did lots of the former and very little of the latter. Meh.

As for the IOI, my obvious next target: I was tired of training and going abroad while paranoid about whether my immune system would hold up. I didn’t feel that the IOI was worth that. To some degree, I also felt burned out about programming. Long story short, my treatment should end soon, and learning Haskell completely resolved the burnout problem.

But the most important reason, I think, was that “high school was too short”. I started math competitions ridiculously early and didn’t spend much time exploring other interests. I thought I knew myself well enough that I could say I didn’t have many more interests at all, but I was completely wrong (psych nerds will reflexively note this to be the Dunning-Kruger effect). I coded lots in weird languages — Haskell, as mentioned previously, plus Scala, plus all manner of other magical command line tools. I wrote my first math problem and submitted it officially, picked up a new instrument, went to a debate competition, served as an unimportant tech guy for MUN, discovered and became hooked on Pentatonix, participated in three puzzle hunts in Australia and one in Massachusetts, figured out my rough political stance, rode a boat, got retweeted by @eevee and @Kyrgyzstan_News, increased my Neopets™ fortune by over 3400%, and lurked on FurAffinity a little too much.

But now, dear competition world, I’m back.

I did it!

I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we entered the ninth floor. Somebody had covered the elevator area with cartoon animals and landscapes. Not surprising, since all the children’s wards were here.

Funny idea, that: I am still a child for medical purposes.

I was not sick. Not more than usually, anyway. I didn’t need to get an IV drip installed or even change into the patient uniform the first night. There was nothing to do or feel. No guilt or fear, unlike last time — this check-up had been scheduled for along time and served as a simple test to see how my bone marrow was doing. No annoyance, either, because I knew it mattered; but no apprehension of the results, or of the needles. You can never get used to the needles, but you learn to just accept them anyway. There is nothing to be done about them.

Who knows? The result could be something bad. But I know enough not to take this hypothetical seriously before it was anything other than hypothetical.

I slept, and dreamt of vomiting carrots.

Isn’t it weird to suddenly talk about this topic?

I don’t think that I have ever talked about music any more than briefly in passing. It might be confusing to my finger quotes audience, and I worry I’ll seem inconsistent.

Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If you wonder, “I didn’t know that you sang and played the piano, or you liked music in that way — or, at all…” please note that I didn’t know either.

So, I somehow managed to get 25 points all by myself in MUMS Puzzle Hunt 2013. Well, I pestered chaotic_iak a little with 3.3 Diagnosus (.html with animated .gif) but we still didn’t recognize all the Pokémon until hint 3, at which point Google sufficed for me.

This is nowhere near the top, but compared to the usual results of whatever AoPS team I form, it’s amazing. By far the best result of AoPS was on CiSRA in 2010 (46th with 58 points), before I discovered puzzle hunts in AoPS; unfortunately due to people getting older and the influx of younger and younger people to the fora, there are less possible teammates each year and they have less time, so here I am by myself. (Also I could have accepted an invitation from a guy in the some-form-of-Elephant team, but I figure if you can win two MUMS hunts in a row you don’t need any more people.)

All in all: Yay!

So winter vacation started and parents had planned a trip to southern Taiwan, to get closer to nature and walk around and stuff.

Also, the MIT Mystery Hunt, the absolute granddaddy of all the other puzzlehunts in terms of age, structure, and size, happened this weekend. Originally, I didn’t have a team and just planned to look at the puzzles after they got archived and try solving some puzzles read the solutions while constantly thinking, “How could anybody ever solve that?” Because of that, I wasn’t planning to even bring my laptop at first; then I could force myself to study some long-overdue ring theory during the nights. I was taken aback by a private message on Saturday morning from somebody with many different names inviting me to remote-solve for Random Thymes.

Me: !!!!!!!!!!