IOI Competition Day 1

The first day of competition is over and apart from a few small hiccups all went well. This is my first time on the leader side of things and I'm quite surprised at the number of meetings we attend, but in a good way. I feel it's excellent that we can all easily have our say, unlike the ACM ICPC where we only have two brief meetings which are often dominated by a few individuals.

It started yesterday with the practice session for which the contestants had two hours to get themselves used to the contest environment and grading system. A couple pictures of our team during this session:



After the practice session, we took seats for the opening ceremony. They had a Croatian quire sing for us, which was beautiful. The speaches were boring as always. The fun part was when they went through the teams and two of our guys blew vuvuzelas, which excited the crowd. They were even interviewed about these strange "horns" as they refer to them in the newsletter.



As team leaders, we received the problems last night. You can grad a copy of them along with the test data here. We spent some time going over the problems and picking out any ambiguities or the likes and trying to get them changed. While checking the problems we also attempted to solve them. We got Aliens pretty quickly. Flood we discussed a bit and although we never quite got a full solution, we got the bits and pieces.

Kim from the Netherlands showing his boredom with the translation:

Not attempting to code the problems makes you a little slack I feel. With Sails on the other hand, we discussed numerous solutions, while all of them were either incorrect for special cases or too inefficient.

There weren't many serious changes that needed to be made, although it still took us to midnight before the English texts were finalised. We were then allowed to sign off, while the others remained to translate into their primary language for their students. We were lucky being English speaking as some teams stayed till after 3am! While waiting for the final version we chatted mostly with the other English speaking teams - Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, UK, US, etc.

This morning we wake up and go out to breakfast and we see a large group of contestants waiting for the buses. They were supposed to be separated from us after we were shown the problems. Obviously there were some problems and a lack of guard resulted in what could have turned into a serious matter. Some leaders were even told to walk through the crowd of students!

After we finished breakfast, the students were set to start at 08:30. A short while later we went to the IOI Conference - a first attempt at hearing the various countries experiences in their national olympiads. It was a reasonable success in my opinion, although the poor English of some speakers made it to some extent difficult to follow. There were some interesting issues and solutions that were brought up, some of which we might even consider taking into account when working on evolving our own event.

After the conference we waited for the contestants to return in the buses. They seemed very excited they saw us, discussing with us how they tackled the problems. Still none of them had a full solution to Sails, which made me wonder about the difficulty of the problem. After lunch we got the scores - less than two hours after the competition ended. The results were scattered, with two double and two triple digit scores. The top score was 120 and from discussing with some of the other teams there appears to be many high scores for today. There's an unofficial summary of some of the results here, which puts at least five teams on a full score of 300! I later found out that own very own Bruce Merry also got the max in the online contest.

We had a discussion about the problems and the competition. There were a few issues that the team brought up, some of which were mentioned by others at the following GA meeting. We let the other issues go as they were relatively minor.

All in all, a good day of competition. Hopefully the guys can pick up the pace on Sunday for the second and final competition day. Good luck guys!

Arrival in Croatia

After a reasonable length flight (15 hours), we arrived in Croatia late last night for the IOI. The New Zealand and Egypt team were on the same flight as us. New Zealanders had a broken bag on arrival and so we had to wait for them to sort that out before we could take the bus to our accommodation. Egypt has sent 14 observers since they will be hosting the event in Cairo next year.

Team photo at Zagreb Airport:


We arrived at about 23:30 at a reasonable (as hostels go) hostel. Contestants are in a separate building to the rest of us team leaders, observers and guests. We have free, speedy Internet access here (this test says 50mbps and 60ms ping) and so, guess what our main communication medium between contestants and coaches is?

This morning we went to register at 09:00. The process was a little chaotic, but we were the third to arrive and so some forgiveness is in order. We got yet another bag and three t-shirts and plenty other free goodies as always. It's a public holiday here today and they never served breakfast so we had to search for an open shop. Our guide, Mislav, was very kind and took us on a tour of the city center, telling us lots of Croatian history along the way. One of the things I enjoy about Europe is the rich history and cultures they have and Croatia is no disappointment in that regard.

Some pics of our city tour (more available here):


Tomorrow we have a practice session and opening ceremony followed by two GA meetings, which is where us team leaders discuss things important and not so important. Remember to check out the online contest on Friday.

Something I can't believe I almost forgot to mention. The heat here is pretty intense, especially coming from chilly and rainy Cape Town weather. It's over 30° today with a forecast of 36° tomorrow. Add that to the high humidity levels and you get heat exhausting, big time!

Eendrag Burns!

This was the scene at Stellenbosch University yesterday:



One of their residences, Eendrag, caught fire yesterday early morning. Most of the third floor and roof is completely destroyed! There were only two injured, although one of them is likely to be permanently paralyzed!

Two of the members of the IOI team I will be taking to Croatia next week, Ralf Kistner and Dirk-B Coetzee, used to live there. Luckily they don't seem to have been affected too much by it in terms of damaged property. One of their friends, who also lived there, posted a couple comments on a previous post. There's a large collections of photos and a video here and some comments by the students here.

I hope for all the best in recovering from this disaster, and especially that the injured recover as much as possible.

IOI Online Contest

It was just announced today that this year's IOI problems will be available online an hour after the real contest and you can have a bash at them as well as submit solutions. So if you're keen on getting a taste of some of the action I will be getting (albeit as coach, not contestant), be sure to free yourself next week Friday 17th and Sunday 19th.

The contest will be hosted at http://evaluator.hsin.hr/. It should be interesting to see how the now experienced ex-contestants such as Bruce Merry can do against the youngsters. Unfortunately as I will be on site I won't be able to take part in the online contest, however I'll see the problems the evening before so I'll most certainly give them a bash on paper (or in my head).

Training the Youth

When a paper-based round was added to the SACO in 2003, suddenly the participation nearly tripled. Students without access to a computer were finally able to participate. However, participation in the computer-based second round (or what was originally the first round) remained fairly constant. If someone did well in the first round, but never knew how to program, there wasn't much they could do.

Yesterday, however, the situation was improved slightly. The top students from schools unable to compete in the second round were invited to learn Python. I was one of the three students that went to teach them. There were 15 of them and only 4 of them had any programming experience (Java). The rest knew nothing about programming before we visited them.

I was expecting there to be maybe a couple interested with the rest wishing they weren't there. I couldn't have been more wrong. They were all very eager to learn and they caught on surprisingly quickly. There was one that wasn't too interested, but the rest found it so amazing that they were learning to control the computer. Withing less than three hours they understood up to if-else statements. To put it into perspective, it usually takes two weeks before loops are covered at UCT using Java.

The SACO started advertising Python since 2005 when The Shuttleworth Foundation sponsored prizes for the top Python 3rd round participants. Since then UCT has spawned a 1st year Python course for advanced programmers as a replacement to the usual Java course. Most students taking the course get hooked onto Python. While I do have other favourites for other tasks, I certainly like using Python for several tasks mainly due to its conciseness.

There have been discussions about Python replacing Java at schools. However, most teachers are against change and so it's a difficult battle. From the experience of training these kids with little to no programming experience I can confidently say that Python is a much better teaching language than Java. There's nothing that is required before it can be explained, such as the classic "public static void main(String args[]) {". Compare System.out.println() in Java to print in Python. It's self-evident which is easier to teach.

The training continued today, however I had other kiddies to train. This time it was ACM ICPC training. The regional contest is coming up in mid-October so now was time to get the training started. As I can no longer compete, having won two regionals, I am now doing the training. Some of this bunch are older than me even, which makes for could make for an interesting experience if one of them wins. We went over some old problems, which some of them tackled fairly well.

Next weekend the training continues, but once again with a different bunch. I be training the IOI team I'm going with to Zagreb, Croatia on the 14th. For that training we have to set new problems for them to solve under competition conditions, i.e. a mock IOI.

Petrol Strike: Pumps Dry

Those in South Africa are likely to have heard about the recent strike by fuel truck drivers. Yesterday Cape Town was hit by the strike, while Johannesburg and Pretoria have been feeling the impact earlier this week. I was one of the unfortunate to get to the petrol station too late as by yesterday most pumps were already dry.

The drivers were given an 8% wage increase, but they are demanding a 9.5% increase as well as demanding temporary workers be made permanent. While in South Africa we are actually very lucky that we aren't that badly affected by strikes (I know it's far worse in Europe), it's awful just thinking about how such a simple problem can have widespread consequences affecting so many people. Think about how many people are stuck without any petrol, unable to use their cars at all!

It appears as though the situation is improving with oil companies using contract drivers to deliver petrol. They still haven't come to an agreement and one only hopes all will return to normal operations quickly.

Grand Turismo 5

Gran Turismo has always been my favourite PlayStation game. It's the only series I've always anxiously awaited the next release of. The fifth installment is planned for release early next year. It will be the first 1080P PS3 game.

Here's a short trailer that was shown at E3 last month:



Sony quite a while ago made a concept version of the game, Gran Turismo HD Concept, available free for download. As you can imagine though, the file was rather large and the bandwidth in SA rather lacking. Yesterday being the last day of the month however, I was able to let the the thing consume all the bandwidth it required - which turned out to be 690MB!

So I started playing around with it this afternoon. I must say I'm pretty impressed. This concept version is based on the new engine built for GT5 and I can certainly feel the difference. They provide ten cars to test, but only one track. One of the cars is a Ferrari, which I'm glad to see they've finally sorted out a license for! The graphics aren't there just yet, but that we can judge when the full game is launched.

Let the serious PS3 games roll on out!