EJOI 2024 blog

Friday, August 16 | Hongjia

Surprisingly, we were all roughly on time for our flight! On our way to the check-in, we realized that the currency in Moldova was not Euros (just like last year, where Euros wasn’t the currency used in the country which held EJOI, Georgia), and that we might want to exchange money somewhere. Since it wasn’t really urgent, we went on with our schedule and caught our flight to Vienna then to Moldova.

It was surprising to know that there are only 2 flights to Moldova, namely from Vienna or from Warsaw, so many delegations arrived at similar times. We met the French and Belgium team in the airport, and we went on the same bus to the hotel. This friendship with the francophones will continue because there are no German-speaking delegations.

After we arrived at the hotel, we were surprised to find out how fancy the rooms were. The room was nearly twice as large as those during EGOI, and there was huge space for the luggage and goodies. The goodies, though, were not as good as those in EGOI, but they were still somewhat standard. What was really a problem was the design of the medals, which is literally square and hanged from the same band as those used for our participant badges. We used this to tell ourselves that it was also fine not getting them.

In the evening, we went to eat with the French delegation. The food in the hotel seemed to be standard, with spaghetti Bolognese. Then, we returned to our rooms and pray for an amusing opening ceremony the day after.

Saturday, August 17 | Myriam

We went to the breakfast, which was thankfully better than Friday’s dinner (we understood after that the breakfast was always the best meal of the day in the Hotel (although crepes were called pancakes)). Then, we went to the contest hall for the practice sessions, where I wasn’t able to implement correctly a binary search because it was an interactive task. We had some papers for asking questions, from technical problem to medical issues, included chocolate (which was Moldavian, and not so good) and general questions.

Then, we went to lunch in the hotel, where we didn’t have a lot of choice of food, especially for vegetables. Then we went to university for the opening ceremony, but before we took team picture with the colorful T-shirt (but Alex had the SOI shirt because he didn’t have the colorful T-shirt, but Wiktoria didn’t have the SOI shirt, so we couldn’t all wear it), and Alex, Hongjia and me took a kind of picture with a 360° camera. After that, we went to the ceremony room, but there was a special security because the Moldovan president was there too.

In the opening ceremony, we obviously threw chocolates, but the Croatian team threw their red and white bucket hats too (Wiktoria and I had one!)! We heard some speeches, for example one of the president of Moldova, and saw a Moldovan dance, without forgetting that we heard the Moldovan and EU (but Moldova isn’t in EU, and it was European and not EU Olympiads) hymns. Then, we went to the hotel for dinner (which was as good as lunch) and we learned that Théo and Wiktoria had to remove themselves from the WhatsApp group because they couldn’t have any contact with us after the beginning of their translation session, although we had a discord group (and it wasn’t ok if we had another WhatsApp group without them but with our guide, and we didn’t use the other one).

Sunday, August 18 | Alex

Today [0] was the first contest day! After waking up broken because of playing Tichu late well slept, we went to get breakfast. Nothing remarkable happened there.

Then, after waiting with the leaders and our guide for Myriam and Hongjia to come to the reception, we went to the contest hall. For some reason, we had to wait outside for 20 minutes before entering. Then we finally went to our desks and got to meet our rubber ducks again. On our desks we found paper cards with different symbols: one for technical problems, one to get water, three to get food, one for general questions.

Once we got to know the system, the 4 hours of contest started. Except, I had a lot of trouble logging in because the caps lock on my keyboard started going in and out of sync with the laptop randomly. That cost me 5 minutes, which wasn’t really a lot in the final result.

The contest went… I don’t even know how to describe it.

Task 1: Sounds ok, impossible to debug even the brute force solution, graph task 💀

Task 2:

Note that the lack of descriptions for the last two exchanges provided is intentional, and not explaining the last four exchanges is yet again, intentional. The contestant should try to figure out the configurations themselves - Task statement [1]

Task 3: 5 pages of task statement, graph task 💀

After the end of the contest, the average interaction looked like this:

Person 1 - How did it go?

Person 2 - No comment (Thinking: 7 points out of 300)

Person 1 - Same (Thinking: 7 points out of 300)

It turns out, the whole Swiss team got only 7 points each, all on the third task with the brute force solution. And all of us thought, that they were the worst on the team. After figuring out the situation, we were not feeling so miserable anymore, and went to meet our leaders.

It wasn’t only us who got only 7 points. In total, 21 contestants had that result.

Then, we went to eat lunch.

After lunch, we had an unplanned excursion organised by our and the Estonian guide together with the French and the Estonian teams. They have shown us some of Chisinau’s landmarks. It was fun :)

Before dinner, we played exploding kittens with the Armenian contestants and I managed to draw the bomb as my first card 4 turns in a row [2]. Also, I learned to play a wonderful game called Mao [3], where you can’t talk about the rules. [4]

After dinner, we played Werewolves from wish.com Mafia and only stopped to “Get some sleep” [5]

Monday, August 19 | Hongjia

We all woke up quite early to prepare ourselves for the excursion day. It was all of us’ first time in Moldova, so we were quite looking forward to seeing the city.

It was a good idea to have brought my sun cream on the bus, because the sun was literally burning all of us. This heat begins early in the morning, continues throughout the day until we arrived back to the hotel. It disturbed my concentration on the actual guided tour by a lot because every time we arrived somewhere, I wanted to find the shadow to survive. However, some places are definitely worth remembering. One of them was a church / monastery, where there were actual monks staying, and which was located in somewhere like a cave. Why was it interesting? Well, it was very peculiar to see a monastery like this, as I always imaged a church to be large and high and not in a cave. This was a very interesting experience though, and I really like the atmosphere created when all candles are lightened up inside a cave. Another remarkable place was a traditional Moldovan house. It was said that to keep the price for painting the walls low, the walls are coloured in light blue. This was very beautiful! We could visit inside the traditional rooms and our guide gave us some information about the room where people store wine. We also visited a farm-like place where we saw cute kitties and socialized with other delegations.

Lunch was at a traditional restaurant, where we had Moldovan dish. It was mostly acceptable, and better than the food the hotel usually offered us.

The heat was not only an invariant but an increasing monovariant. In the afternoon, I got so dizzy due to the heat that I really couldn’t go out of the bus and visit another house outside. Since I thought I already saw a Moldovan house in the morning, I stayed on the bus and waited for the people to come back. Myriam and Alex’s mother stayed with me due to the heat. We were smart, since after a few minutes, we saw someone with a heavy nosebleed and dizziness coming back to the bus.

By the time I finally arrived at our icy heaven: the hotel, I wanted to take a shower and just rest. Firstly, I don’t want to die out of sunburn or fever the next day, and secondly, tomorrow was the contest day 2! After wishing the Swiss team good luck, I went to sleep, in the hope that I can chill myself from the heat and not screw up day 2 too badly.

Tuesday, August 20 | Myriam

On Tuesday, we had the second contest, where we could learn about traditional Moldovan dances (that we saw in the closing ceremony and that we danced in Wednesday’s dinner). Thankfully, this contest was better for us than the previous one, but it wasn’t really hard. After the contest, Théo and Wiktoria said to Hongjia and I that we were pretty close with the bronze cut-off, and that it could be between us (we only had a difference of 10 points) (and it was (to be clear, Hongjia had a medal and me not, because of really small errors)).

After that, we went to lunch and then “taught” some guide how to play Mao, Tichu, and we played Spies, Mafia and exploding kittens, with the dinner in the middle.

Wednesday, August 21 | Alex

Today [6] was the closing ceremony! After waking up well slept (actually this time) [7], we went to get breakfast. Nothing interesting happened.

After breakfast we boarded the bus and went to the final excursion - Clasa Viitorului

The excursion started with a speech on the topic of robotics in education. Then, there was an open workshop about different robotics tools.

The most popular attraction by far were the drones - that is why they ran out of battery in 10 minutes. Also, there were:

• Little robots in plastic spheres that could roll around and are programmable
• A 3D-Printer
• Robots that you could play football with
• Electronic circuit kit
• More robots

Then, we all went outside to take a photo in the shape of the EJOI 2024 logo. In the blazing sun, it was painful because we had to look up straight at the sun. It went quite fast though.

While we had the excursion at Clasa Viitorului, the leaders went to a winery, because (according to the guides) Moldova is famous for its wines.

Then, we went to eat lunch and to the closing ceremony, back to Clasa Viitorului

There, the winners were announced! Myriam got an honorable mention, and Hongjia a bronze medal.

After that there was a lot of loud music and traditional dances.

Then, we all went to the restaurant and had dinner. Again, there was music and everyone was dancing Hora, a moldavian traditional dance, which was the topic of yesterday’s last task. I could not debug it for some reason, which made me fall into a 2-minute depression. When it ended, I joined the dance and forgot all the contest troubles.

Later, we played Tichu and Mao [8]. When we got tired, we went back to the hotel. The guides said, we should get some “sleep” [9] before the departure day, which was completely unnecessary but whatever, I guess.

Contest stats:

• 220.84 points gotten in the contest
• 1 bronze medal + 1 Honorable Mention
• Average rank of 63.6
• 6 rubber ducks used while debugging
• 3 guides taught to play Tichu
• ~138 penalties in Mao [10]
• ~12 stupid Tichu plays, made by me
• ~60 pieces of Swiss chocolate thrown at the opening ceremony

Thursday, August 22 | Hongjia

Today was the last day in Moldova!

We didn’t have much to do in the morning, so we went to buy some souvenirs. Our guide gave us suggestions for traditional Moldovan chocolates, and it tasted very different from the Swiss ones. Afterwards, our guide said goodbye to us, giving each of us a nice postcard and a chocolate medal. We then went on the bus to the airport.

Our flight back to Switzerland was also as expected, without any delays or accidents. In general, this was a fun competition, not badly organized, and we could all learn something from it.