Newsletter 5: Friday, 14th July

And finally, the last round of CEOI 2017’s competition.
On Friday, which was the last day of activities involving this year’s Olympiad, the contestants first had their breakfast in Vič’s dormitory, where they stayed during the whole week.

According to their words they were extremely exhausted, nevertheless they managed to pull their last strings and got ready for the second half of the competition. Like previous days they gathered at Faculty of Computer and Information Science and at approximately 9 AM they sat behind the computers and started solving the tasks they were given.
They had five hours during which they tried to solve 3 different tasks. Most of them stayed until the very end but for couple of the contestants it took a lot less to finish. Live results were streamed during the whole time and all the teams were cheering for their members. In one of the classrooms team leaders would translate the questions to the organizers in case the contestants had any difficulties. At around 2 PM they exited the classrooms and were awaited by some of the Slovenian media. Everyone was eager to hear about their impressions.

Later on there was lunch at the faculty’s cafeteria and all the contestants could finally relax since the hardest part was over. The lunch was followed by another GA meeting and after that the final results were published. During the free time we took some pretty interesting interviews with them which you can read here below. It was all quite inspiring and we were very pleased to hear how everyone made new friends and got along very well.

At 5 PM the awarding ceremony took place at the faculty and the CEOI 2017 officially ended. Contestants had one last evening to catch a glimpse of the Ljubljana’s atmosphere before they leave for their new life adventures.

Hopefully they had a wonderful time here during these past five days and they are going home full of nice memories and useful experience. Nevertheless, we already look forward to hearing more about them in the future.

We also interviewed one of the members from the remaining groups that we didn't get the chance to interview yet. You can read their answers down below.

Lea & Rebeka

Interviews

Stanisław Strzelecki - contestant from Poland

Q: Hello! Tell me something about yourself.
A: I'm now in the second grade of high school. So in two years I will be going to college. My hobby is progarmming, but that is probably not a surprise.
Besides that, I like to play football. Maybe I also like maths but not as much as programming. I think that's all.

Q: Who is your favorite soccer player?
A: From my home country it's Robert Lewandowski, but if I look at other teams then
it would be Manuel Neuer.

Q: Great, so you are a Bayern fan. :-)
A: Yes, exactly.

Q: Are you going to study informatics in the future?
A: I haven't made the decision yet, but I'm almost sure I will.

Q: What is your opinion about this contest?
A: The contest itself was quite good. I think that the platform and tasks were fine. The only thing that I didnt't really like was that both days I got 200 points after an hour and a half and then I couldn't solve the third task for the next three more hours. The tasks required some things that I just didin't know and were almost impossible for me to solve. If the easier problems were harder maybe the other people, that solved them slowlier would not have enought time to solve the third task and then I would probably get more points. But that is my personal thing. I don't think it's a bad thing for the contest. I pretty much like it, it was really nice.

Q: Do you think it was well organized?
A: Yes, the contest itself was. But I think the event had a bit too many activities and just not enough time to rest. It's not only me, my whole team was looking to avoid some of the activities to get back to the hotel and rest because they were quite tired. You know how it is with traveling and stressing out... You just want to rest a bit.

Abutalib Namazov - contestant from Azerbaijan

Q: Hello. What is your name?
A: My name is Abutalib Namazov and I'm from Azerbaijan.

Q: How was your day?
A: It was nice. There were good and really hard problems. I liked it.

Q: Did you participate in any other international competition in informatics yet?
A: No, it was the first time for me.

Q: When did you start to learn programming?
A: I started last year, in 7th grade. I'm a beginner.

Q: How old are you?
A: I'm 14 years old.

Q: You are probably the youngest here. Do you like it here?
A: Yes, it's really nice here.

Q: What about the food? Did you like it?
A: It was normal.

Q: What does that mean? :-)
A: It was not bad.

Nir Shalmon - contestant from Israel

Q: How are you?
A: I'm fine, now that the contest is over. I'm much less nervous. Today it was a lot harder than two days ago. But looking at the score it was likewise for everybody.

Q: How do you like Slovenia so far?
A: I think it's pretty nice. I haven't managed to look around too much, but it seems nice. It's my first time here.

Q: How was your team selected?
A: First we had a stage A test in school, which had no required knowledge, just basic thinking skills. Around 300 people passed this test and went to the second stage. Problems on this stage are similar to those on this contest. We needed to write an algorithm or a pseudocode and explain the algorithm. Then another 40 people passed that test and we were given weekly training sessions. Once a week we had a day for tests, which lasted 4 or 5 hours and then we had the interviews. The trainers asked us how we solved the problems. So even if we didn't get the points, they could see we almost suceded. In the interviews they could see how you're thinking.
So, if you were able to find an algorithm but you couldn't programme the solution, they would still teach you how to programme. And then like every few weeks they selected only some of the participants of training until they reached 4 people. And then it got more intense, you got two simulations of IVP per week. So five hours a week you solved three quiestiones and after you finished you would try to get a full score after reading the solutions. And they also gave us stuff to learn. And that's it.

Q: Well, that's pretty hardcore. What do you like to programme as a hobby?
A: Since last year, when I started practicing for the olympiad, I've stopped programming as a hobby.:-) It's just too much. But before that I would mostly make games.

Q: On which platform?
A: Mostly web games.

Q: So Unity, JavaScipt and so on?
A: Yes, Unity with C#.

Thomas Kaar - contestant from Austria

Q: What's your name?
A: Thomas.

Q: And you're from Austria?
A: Right.

Q: How are you today?
A: Yeah I'm pretty fine, I think I did well on the second day, but I didn't do that well on the first day. But that's how it is, I can't change anything about it.

Q: Did you also participate last year in this competition?
A: No, actually we had kind of a problem with finding the sponsor in Austria. Last year we weren't participating, and this year we were only able to have two participants because of the money. It's the first time for me, it's also the first time to be at an informatics olympiad.

Q: What do you think about the city?
A: It looks pretty similar to the cities in Austria, but I think it's beautiful with the cave we saw a little bit outside of Ljubljana and the castle, it's a beautiful view, I enjoyed it.

Q: What got you into programming?
A: In Austria we have technical schools based on informatics, so you learn informatics, you learn programming languages like java, C#, C, C++. One of the teachers asked me if I wanted to participate, because he thought I could do well, so I tried it and got here.

Bibin Muttappillil - contestant from Switzerland

Q: Could you introduce yourself?
A: I'm Bibin, from Switzerland and from the Swiss delegation. I'm 18 years old and I go to gymnasium, which is like a high school for those who want to go to university afterwards.

Q: Which university are you planning to go to?
A: I plan to go to ETH. It's a highly technical school, if you like programming, mathematics or science you should go there, but it's also pretty hard.

Q: Are you satisfied with your performance this competition?
A: Kind of. This is the first time I participated in an international programming contest. I scored well on some tasks but not on many, I'm glad that I solved something.

Q: Will you return to Slovenia in the future?
A: I'm not sure because I usually go on holidays with my family, and we usually go where relatives are, but Ljubljana is a nice, small and very beautiful city. There are many bridges and it's interesting from an architectural standpoint.

Paulína Smolárová - contestant from Slovakia

Q: How are you today? What do you think about todays tasks?
A: Quite good. Tasks were quite easy, really easier than I expected, so much easier than last years' tasks. I solved two of them.

Q: So you were also a participant last year. How did it go?
A: Yes. Bronze.

Q: How do you like Slovenia?
A: I like that there are so many green places. It's not so common in the world that the capital city has so many green areas, I really like it.

Q: Were you up on the castle?
A: Yes, the trip was a little bit disorganized, I liked the Postojna cave more because I think there should be more than two groups, we didn't even fit in a room in the castle, so we couldn't listen. But the Postojna cave was really great, one of the greatest caves I've ever been in and I would definitely recommend it to everyone.

If you'd like to see some snapshots of this week, scroll below.