I went to MITIT this weekend, on a team with JW and RX, both campers.
Saturday: I get to MIT at like 4, and at like 5 I find one of my MIT physics friends T and hang out for a bit, he gives me a tour of simmons, it’s pretty nice
I go check in, grab some merch, and see IZ and meet him. We go play poker for a while, there weren’t enough chips at the beginning. While we wait we watch [redacted] talk about [redacted], that was kinda funny. Anyway we find some chips and play a 3p poker game, I end up winning, but probably I was playing too aggressively. I also find RX and greet him.
then we go see what codetiger is talking about, and yea, I alr mentioned the details. codetiger: “you’re alternet? from usaco discord?”
anyway, lunch break, I go see my friend AL (math), we eat dinner at maseeh hall. the food was pretty good. we also got a live performance of some holiday songs, that was cute.
after that, i go to the estimathon (custom rules) and compete with rutgers team “jdurie” on like a 15-person team (no limit does this to people). I troll a few problems and solve a few. on one problem i was 100 orders off rip. anywaay we get like 6th.
On the way out i meet JW and vyx7.
Sunday. actual day of competition.
after breakfast, we go to opening ceremony, i honestly dont’ really remember it. there was a jump trading presentation i think. then indiv rounds, I speedforce A, but then can’t make that much progress on B after making enough observations for fullsolve (i just didn’t believe in the answer, i had it written down on paper :nooooooo: anyway i didn’t guess that it was just right and wanted to find a partition to do it, and couldn’t, rip). then I try to impl persistent trie + offline seg trick for C. didn’t debug in time. (did debug after contest, but then its mle/tle/whatever. rip)
JW gets first with 200+eps and RX gets like 5th with 200, both AB. Im 100, rip.
Then we get lunch, i’m allergic to everything so i run out and buy some food at a nearby cava. (btw cava is overrated ngl)
Team round. RX claims A, JW claims B, I sit around reading ABCDEG with literally 0 progress on all of them.
My first impression: interactive. cancer constructive. constructive. geo. constructive (ok i also cant solve the base problem rip)… yea i didn’t really like this distro.
Then I help RX solve A, and I try to solve E but it’s fakesolve rip. Then we tackle C (wow i misread all along). I write brute force and find pattern, but RX tries something first and beats me by like 5 mins. then we do some subtask grabbing as by that time JW already finished B.
We get like 330. 1st, advanced onsite HS (only camper team lol). like 10th ish HS and 10th ish onsite? idr lmao.
at that point arclinux is first on leaderboard, but we know they cheated (they cheated in calico too lmao)
after team round we go chill out a bit. james and i set up a game of cambio, i learn the proper rules (they are funnier). james is so orz at cambio.
afterwards i meet up with AL and go on a mini MIT tour. only at this point do i realize all the buildings are basically connected :facepalm: which is nice. killian court is also really nice :D.
At the awards ceremony, we get a performance from logarythms (idk spelling), and then a speech from jonathanpaulson, that was nice, a lot of the comments about usaco camp were very relatable LOL (btw i lost to him in bughouse like 10/10 times at camp).
Then we get alex’s farewell speech. it reminds me of my own journey a lot… of the old usaco server community… of teamscode…
He concludes with a mention of gpt, and a call for more in-persons. definitely would be nice to go to more in-persons. gpt does really suck for organizing contests and problemsetters tho :(
Then awards. A lot of orz people win awards. i see tourist irl (my life is complete now). RX and JW win indivs awards. We win team first place, which is nice.
Then we go outside and take some pictures. vyx comes out and tells us that the sponsor Silares wants to eat dinner with us. too bad RX and I have to go, sad, would’ve been nice to eat dinner with some famous cp goats.
well, that was fun, even if i kinda trolled. thanks to RX and JW for the carry! oh and thanks sponsors for the merch! and of course codetiger & mitit for everything!
