Davoscamp - what really happened

Day 1 - Monday

As we arrived in Davos a sunburst welcomed us. After the brilliant lunch some enjoyed the slopes of Davos and the others acclimatised to the Alpine school and its rules.

From 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. we had the first practical contest. The quite concrete tasks (hold a mobile in balance, extricate bowls from a big bag, analyse a shuffled playlist and connect groups of cities) led to tricky informatical puzzles.

Daniel Graf, Simon Laube

Day 2 - Tuesday

The second day began with a theoretical warmup test by Richard Kralovic. After that there were four lectures, two easier (datastructures and dynamic programming) and two harder ones (bi-parted graphs and hashing lectured by Jan Senko from Google). The afternoon was at everyone’s disposal. Before dinner, the excercises of the preceding evening were discussed and the perfect solution shown. This was done by Michal Forisek (TeX notation: Fori\v{s}ek). After dinner there were four new exercises: making numbers out of matchsticks, calculating rafts, pinning notes to a billboard and driving a car across a rollercoaster mountain.

Day 3 - Wednesday

Day 3 began like yesterday with a theoretical warmup test. Then we had a lecture from Oskar Nierstrasz («Everything is an object!») about Smalltalk and Squeak. We had time to apply Squeak in a practical exercise. Exactly as the day before the afternoon was at everyone’s disposal and the exercises of the preceding day were discussed just before dinner. This evening’s exercises were: calculating the length of a rope for a goat, flooding skyscrapers, leading two robots out of a maze and peeling a two-dimensional potato :) .

In the late evening the we had lots of fun playing FibonacciPoker® (© by Yannick Stucki) with the Sandro Feuz.

Day 4 - Thursday

The fourth day, as usual, began with two theoretical warmup tasks. Then we had four lectures (Minimum Spanning Trees and sorting algorithms, text compression and trees), whereas the absolute highlight of the day was the arrival of ‘el virtuoso’ Titus who surprisingly smashed us all in the evening-competitions with the maximum score of #100000000000 OVERFLOW. The afternoon was, again, at everyone’s disposal (some crazy guys went snowboarding in a snowstorm) and, again, the exercises of the last evening were discussed before dinner. After dinner there were four new exercises: picking up the unsorted pages of an encyclopedia, adding sequences of numbers, counting all possible heaps and watering pastures. In the rest of the evening the computers were talking because some guys had discovered the ‘say’ command on the UNIX Terminal which «Converts text to audible speech». They tried to make a rap using the ‘say’ command with texts like ‘nz nz nz’ and ‘jt jt jt’.

Hans Sjökvist, Titus Cieslewski, Timon Gehr, Christian Zommerfelds, Josef Ziegler, Yannick Stucki