Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 19 January 2006 at 08:26
Well I'm now back in Cambridge. Lectures start again today, and I have my first supervision (left over from last term). Between leaving Belfast on Wednesday and getting to Cambridge on Saturday, I spent several days staying with my aunt in Hove (near Brighton). During this time I rode up and down the south coast by railway, and visited Stonehenge, Salisbury, Chichester, Bosham, Portsmouth, Brighton and Fishbourne.
A few photos are at http://www.martinorr.name/2006/South
On Monday I went to visit our IOI guide, Beata. She and her friend Marzena are working in a cafe in Bracknell. They are both enjoying living in England and clearly it is financially worth coming here: the minimum wage is five times what it is in Poland, rent costs four times as much, food up to twice as much and other things are of comparable price. Marcin, a friend in college with Polish parents, reckons that the difference in prices is greater than that but that it would still be possible to save considerably more in the UK than in Poland.
Full Term started on Tuesday with a college test on last term's work. I came top out of the people who did the test, although one of the three Maths Directors of Studies did not get his students to take the test; and by an alphabetical coincidence that includes five of the seven former IMO team members (four UK, one Ireland, one Greece and one Vietnam) in the year.
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Martin
Tags
england, holiday, ioi, tripos
Posted by Martin Orr on
Tuesday, 15 November 2005 at 14:04
This weekend I went to Stockholm for the ACM North-west Europe Regional programming Contest. This was a very short trip - we were in Stockholm for about 48 hours from Friday evening to Sunday evening. The organisers had scheduled talks on a variety of computing topics on the Saturday morning; we didn't go to these in order to get some time for sightseeing. I'm glad I did this because the part of Stockholm where the competition was and where we were staying was pretty dull, but the centre of Stockholm was worth seeing. It contains a lot of water - being built on a series of islands - and contains many impressive buildings.
On Sunday there was the competition itself. We solved five problems out of nine, which put us in fourth place. The other Trinity team solved three problems and came around the middle. I was pretty pleased with this position, although I know we could have done better if Mark and I had done a lot of practice at coding quickly as Paul has (however this does not seem to me a useful skill for anything other than programming competitions).
On the journey home, I observed that check-in in Stockholm Skavsta airport was done entirely manually: they had a printed list of passengers on which they ticked your name off and then wrote the details onto a boarding pass.
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Martin
Tags
ioi, programming, sweden
Posted by Martin Orr on
Wednesday, 09 November 2005 at 08:30
I'm pretty busy at the moment, largely due to the fact that I am going to Stockholm at the weekend for the ACM programming contest. This is a competition in which universities send teams of three, broadly similar to the IOI except that you work as a team and the trip is much shorter (only three days). Trinity is sending two teams; the one I'm on also has Paul Jeffreys, UK/GB IMO and IOI medallist, and Mark Thompson, GB IOI medallist and member of the UK IMO squad.
As well as training for the competition itself, it has also meant I have had to reschedule a supervision from Friday to this afternoon. With two supervisions yesterday as well that has meant a lot of work the past few days, but fortunately it is all done now.
What else have I been doing? My parents came to visit Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, which was great. On Sunday there was the Freshers' Concert in the Master's Lodge: anyone in the first year could audition to perform in this, and we had a range of stunning performances on piano, violin, viola, bassoon and voice. The first year choral scholars also did a couple of pieces - Cole Porter and something similar, very different from their usual chapel repertoire!
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, ioi, music, tcms, trinity
Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 28 August 2005 at 13:46
In the end I won the top silver medal at the IOI. There was a gap of 14 points above me, so this was definitely the right place to put the boundary. This year, they also had presents for the medallists: silver medallists were all given a digital camera. A few photos from this camera from the IOI can be found at http://www.martinorr.name/2005/IOI.
I returned from the IOI late on Thursday night. The week I was away was almost certainly the week during which I received the greatest volume of post of my life: exam results, a letter from school about re-marks, a letter of congratulation from the headmaster, confirmation of my student loan entitlement, and a large envelope from Trinity (plus the Cambridge Union sent their promotional booklet separately, postmarked a day earlier). The stuff from Trinity weighed in at over 500g and I spent most of Friday reading it.
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Martin
Tags
ioi, trinity
Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 22 August 2005 at 15:10
This morning was the second contest in the IOI. I solved all three problems, just about in the time. However it turned out that I did not have the fastest solution for one of them so my final score was 274 making a total of 483. The scores were available even faster this morning - 45 minutes after the competition ended. Cian scored 122 today so may well get a medal; Stephen scored 29 and Alex 0 (he had a very small bug without which he would have got 100).
Many other people seem to have done well (over 400) which would make the gold cutoff high. However I am not sure how much my observations are skewed by the fact that I tend to know people who have been to several olympiads before. Mark Thompson from Great Britain scored about 470.
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Martin
Tags
ioi