CEOI 2024 Blog

Sunday, June 23 | Kimi

The first day started before we even met each other.

We arranged to meet at 08:00 at Zürich HB. This meant that I should have taken the train leaving at 06:40. The last option I could take to reach our train in Zürich left at 07:11.

The problem is, I woke up at exactly 07:22 with 6 missed calls, because my mother asked me when I would need to be somewhere.

We immediately went into the car to try to get to Zürich HB before the train leaves.

The ETA was 08:49.

After a quick call with Nandor we organized that I would try to run for the train, but if I didn’t make it I could take the next one.

Somehow the ETA went down from 08:41 to 08:40 to 08:39 while waiting at a crossing and literally standing still. In the end, I was able to make it in time on the train.

The rest of the train travel went by pretty quickly. We played some Codenames, “Polnisch Tichu” and some other games to pass the time.

We were a bit late to the dinner, but were still able to get something before they closed.

Shortly after we put our bags in the room and went out to explore the surroundings and watch the Switzerland - Germany match. After like 200 vertical meters, we found a very nice place to watch it, but realized after 5 minutes that there were a lot of bugs and mosquitoes around.

So we switched places and in the end landed on a small staircase in front of the street.

Us seeing the 1:0 for Switzerland

Monday, June 24 | Linus

After waking up in a stifling hot room, we went eating a nice breakfast, nearly* on time. We met our guide and, after the leaders went to the preparation of the contest, we visited the city of Brno.

The city had many sights and theatres. One of them is a clock where you can’t read the time. We also relaxed in a park, climbed into trees and swung on the playground. Behind the theatres there was also a display of water. Texts and graphics were displayed by briefly switching many spray heads on and off again. We wondered whether this could be used to represent floppy bird or another game.

In the afternoon we had our preparation contest, where one of the second task was very hard. But Ursus managed to escape their virtual machine. I think it has not been fixed.

To prepare for the next day we went to a shop and bought some snacks for the next day(s).

After visiting the cathedral and enjoying the view we were motivated for the upcoming events.

Ursus

Can u pls buy this @Nandor @Bibin

Nandor

whats the amount?

also you arent supposed to contact us after 5pm, btw

thumbs up

Kimi

29.65 CHF converted

Benjamin

*reacts with thumbs up and immediatly ignores instruction

Kimi read it from top to bottom and answered before reading the lower part.

Quote of the 08/07/2024

You only have to press the Window key and right click to escape the VM.

Ursus

Tuesday 25.06.2024 | Lionel

The big day of the first day of the contest finally arrived. As always Kimi’s eating speed was at 0 until 3 minutes before we had to leave and only then grew (exponentially).

Because of unknown reasons, we were extremely close to arrive at the facility on time. This unfortunately meant that we were only able to start our obligatory ”Nandor-Motivational-Speech” (jumping and chanting to get pulse up before the contest) 2 minutes before the official start.

While everyone else was already seated, the Swiss delegation assembled in the centre of the room and started chanting. The whole structure bounced with our hops.

• “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1”
• “9 8 7 6…”

Sadly, our ritual was interrupted: * “NOOOOOO, PLEASE SIT DOOOOOOWN!!! NOOOOW!!!” :(

The first day went smoothly except for one minor detail. Kimi decided that the template for the interactive task covid was “ugly” and that he is “not big of a fan of templates” and didn’t use it. Because he also thought printing the solution character by character should be fast enough, this all cost him 43 points.

Diff to get 43 more points:

cout << "Q ";
for (ll i = 0; i < n; i++) cout << (l <= i && i < r);
cout << dl;
---
string s = "Q ";
for (ll i = 0; i < n; i++) s += '0' + (l <= i && i < r);
cout << s << dl;

After visiting a small market (Costly Lesson: Samurai Hotdogs are [almost] uneatably hot) in the towncentre, we went bouldering in the evening.

Us bouldering

The boulder hall

Blog post 2024-06-26 Wed | Ursus

Another day, and another umta-umta-umtata alarm-sound to listen to.

Today we could get enough sleep, unlike other days this week, but anyway. I had my wonderful muesli while others had their fantastic breakfast. We knew today was the rumored “Excursion-Day”!

So what was our excursion, you may ask?

First, we made ourselves on the way to a nearby museum reachable by a short walk. The museum’s subject was… “Anthropology” (or was it “antropopology”, “antrolology”, “ontraprogivity” or “contraproductivity”? Ach, I can’t really remember…) In the main-part, one could’ve learned about the origins and evolution of humans. Lionel and I discussed with weird Austrian guy, Thomas, about reviving mammoths, which was an interesting chat, especially when talking about hairy elephants, which are basically the same. After the program, we went to the café and got some drinks. I’ve convinced Nandor to like Kofola, which, by the way, is “Cola done right”, and that’s great! Since we were in the café doing not fascinating stuff, we played a round of Tichu.

And then Kimi spilled his coffee and broke the entire atmosphere. All of Nandors backpack was full of the horrible substance. I somehow survived that, only my bottle was slightly injured, but it was curable. Whatever… as long this happens once, it’s neglectable.

The museum had a second part, which was some exclusive program of some indigenous people in the Amazonas. Yeah, it could’ve been interesting, but somehow it was quite boring to be guided from place to place and being told some stuff. There were screens with videos (I liked the “Prime Video: Internet Connectivity Problem”-movie, it was very enlightening). But there was also some custom-made game, where you play as a fish and kill other fish to play. It was definitely designed for a mobile phone, but it was not complete trash (unlike other games). I made a “Let’s play: <however this game is called>” and I was providing some exclusive Stofltube content, sadge that no one recorded that.

After playing this game for far too long (I couldn’t die because all the enemies were atrocious, and the level-design was poor if I do say so myself as a level-designer), we made our way to the next part of the excursion. We took a boat from a nearby lake to the Veveří Castle. On the boat, we had lunch. Veveří Castle was okay, we, the participants, had fun talking about using hay balls, water-buckets, climbing or similar tools to jump down from the castle-walls. In the castle, we also ate some fries and drank something at the café.

And then Kimi spilled his elderberry-syrup and the broke entire atmosphe-, okay, it wasn’t that disastrous this time, but we were slowly losing faith in Kimi’s ability in handling fluids.

Slowly, but surely, we made our way back to the boat and on the way back. And suddenly, rainfall! It was a sunny day and then quite the rain, so it was very unexpected. Logical action: we grabbed our umbrellas, jackets or similar utilities, only to experience the end of the rain. One could deduce from the floor, that it literally rained only on us, and nowhere else, because the floor was as dry as the desert just 100m ahead of where it rained.

Immediately after arriving back to the youth hostel, we could rest an-, well, JOKES ON YOU! We had to hurry to the planetarium, which we planned for today and climb a whole mountain, because we were too late. I wasn’t in the mood for hurrying, but the planetarium afterward was pretty nice (especially the screen with Linux boot errors, a mesmerizing piece of art).

We watched a movie about black holes (on the curved ceiling), but there were some leaders and participants (possibly 3 (definitely Kimi)), who were like: “ZZzzZZzz”. When we wanted to leave and didn’t find Kimi, our guide logically asked: “Where did he fall asleep again?”

Afterward, we went to a Lidl to prepare ourselves for the contest tomorrow and after that, we went to a pizzeria to eat dinner.

At the pizzeria, we explained our guide how to play Tichu, which she will hopefully play for all eternity from now on. We also finished our game we began on Monday and Lionel and I won the game. We are truly the superb Tichu-players, obviously.

Anyway, after dinner, we merely got back to the youth hostel and slept, we had no time nor the capacity of doing more.

So yeah, how will the contest tomorrow influence the final ranking?

Thursday, June 27 | Kimi

After a good night, (breakfast) and tram of sleep, we arrived at the contest hall.

The last words from our guide before we left her for the contest were:

Don’t fall asleep guys.

This time we remembered to do the Nandor motivational speech earlier than 2 minutes before the contest should start.

I won’t go over the tasks, but they were quite interesting.

If you are up for a challenge, petrol stations could be nice to have a look at.

After the contest, we discussed the Swiss performance and tried to come up with a definition for _dominating_ another country.

Nandor meanwhile:

It’s unclear what dominating is, but we destroyed Austria.

Afterwards Nandor and Bibin should’ve gone to the leader meeting but we were busy for 2h+ trying to buy seat reservations for our journey back to Switzerland.

In the end, it seemed that the only options were to either arrive on Sunday at 23:30 or to take a train starting at 03:08 from Brno.

Lionel was from the beginning rooting for the idea of the 03:08 train (nobody knows why) and in the end we decided to take it because arriving on Sunday at 23:30 when most of us need to work or go to school on the next day seemed like the worse idea.

We didn’t have any reservation for the first train (which was reservation only), but you’ll see what happened.

In the evening, Linus and Ursus were playing some board-games at an event organized by our guide’s father.

Lionel and me sadly couldn’t join as we had to finish our preparation-papers for our oral German Matura-exam.

Friday, June 28 | Linus

Today, we went into an escape room before going to the closing ceremony. The escape room had many puzzles and locks. We did not achieve the record time but still finished in 45 minutes.

For the closing ceremony, we had all dressed in the Swiss polo shirts, but we forgot to take the Swiss flag to the closing ceremony. Although none of us achieved a medal during the CEOI we were happy with our participation.

All of us got a certificate, but two other countries were not so lucky. Both had a certificate missing :).

The next host of the CEOI 2025 got announced: It will be Romania. Hopefully Switzerland will be invited again next year!

After the closing ceremony, there were some drinks, and we had to give some interviews.

In the evening, after we said goodbye to our guide, we planned the next day.

Bunkerday 29.06.2024 | Lionel

We had to get up pretty early to catch the train to “Moravský kras” (national park). Linus perfectly planned and executed a walking/hiking trip around the park to a sightseeing tower. Big thanks to him!

Us resting

The view

In the afternoon, we explored the fabulous Z-10 bunker in the town-center. As an enthusiast, I generously paid all entry fees as a gift to our greater good.

The Z-10 power-generator

Us enjoying the bunker

Only Linus was wise enough to go to bed at a reasonable time regarding that we had to wake up at 2 am the next day. The rest of us (tried) to solved the QuantCo challenges. I managed to break my Arch by not updating for more than half a year and used the time fixing it with Nandor (and later Kimi). As highlight before bedtime (2h before wakeup-time) Ferdinand hosted a remote Ferdinar from WEOI.

The remote Ferdinar

Blog post 2024-06-30 Sun | Ursus

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, ready for your final day? If that’s so, be prepared to get up at 2:00am and don’t mess anything up with tickets, trains and the usual.

Everybody got at most 2 hours of sleep (except Linus, he actually did go to sleep quite early. Well his fault for missing the one and only, once in a lifetime CEOI/WEOI-Ferdinar on 23:30pm yesterday). In complete darkness we checked out of youth hostel and got to the bus for the train station.

There was only one problem. We had to have a reservation on the first train, which we hadn’t. We went to the tickets-controller and when he asked (in a semi-awaken state): “Reservation tickets?”, Nandor was like: “well… we have Interrail tickets” and Bibin was like: “Actually, we have a reservation!” That surprised us all tremendously, no idea how Bibin managed to get one.

Anyway, we got into our trains and could start sleeping. The loooong-Pikachu (Longchu) I bought actually turned out to be very useful, because it acted as a fantastic pillow! After some sleep, we almost fell asleep again while writing a lot of postcards.

But it was known: It was the train which rings the end of CEOI. Looking back at CEOI, it was an experience like nothing else. Just to state a fraction of all the statistics:

• 10h of contest
• 6 Tasks in contest
• 600 points to receive
• Kimi losing 43 Points because of printing character by character
• An uncountable number of times (+0 just now) of Lionel making bad joke
• 4 times Kimi spilling his drink over people or their belongings, damaging them mentally or physically
• 3 times resupplying our lifestock in Lidl
• 5 selfies with people we had given chocolate to
• 2 times watching football
• At least 4 dogs trying to kill us
• Probably 8 times Kimi being late
• 4 times participants had to wait for leaders
• One time (a probably bigger undetected times) of Nandor falling asleep while watching memes
• 20 times Nandor being shocked by his laptop
• One cat! (arguably a much nicer experience than the dogs)
• 5+ times Thomas roasting the Swiss language
• And much more!

Let it be remembered forever, and… blablabla, you know that stuff, ask GPT or any other LLM to make this ending better.

Aight, bye bye CEOI.