Monday, April 20th (Seraina)

At the entrance (since there is only one, right?) of Zurych (yes, it’s written like this) Airport, we met at 8.30 a.m. Our flight departed at 10.30 but it turned out that it was necessary to meet this early, as we walked reaaally slowly and had to overcome few obstacles before we were able to board the plane. First, most of our bags were checked at security because of our card decks, even though we had made sure to store our metal Tichu boxes in our suitcases. Once we arrived at the gate (with ten minutes to spare), the real trouble began. Ela’s and my seats were in the emergency row, which turned out to be a problem as Ela is not 18 yet. I wasn’t allowed to board either because it was registered in their system that I’m a minor (which I’m not). After waiting for quite a while, Ela got assigned a seat in row 3 and we were already celebrating her upgrade to Business Class. The rest of us also got our seats eventually and we all boarded with a tiny delay (everyone on the plane had to wait for us). Unfortunately, Business Class was only in the first 2 rows, so Ela missed out. The flight was uneventful (like this [1] ) and we thought, we’d finally broken our streak of bad luck. Wrong. We got our suitcases pretty quickly, however, Yael’s backpack was still missing and suddenly the baggage belt stopped. We were all panicking and went to the lost and found office, where Yael was told rather rudely to just wait longer. Eventually, the backpack arrived and we were relieved. We ate delicious sushi bowls for lunch and then boarded the train to Wroclaw. After around five hours, we arrived at the hotel (the rooms were unexpectedly quite big), where we got sandwiches for dinner. Unlike usual, we went to bed rather early.

Tuesday, April 21st (Myriam)

Tuesday was the first non-travel day of the girls camp, so we woke up after a good night of sleep excited to see how the camp was going to be. After a good breakfast (the best one I had during the three days I was there), we went to the room for the contest , already arriving late. The contest had four tasks, sorted by difficulty. The first one was about putting numbers on a rectangular board, while alternating the parity. The second problem was interactive, but it wasn’t that bad. You had an unknown array, and you could perform up to $n$ queries that changed to values of the array and returned a value, and you had to find the original array. It sounds like it could be really hard depending on the queries, but in fact you only needed to solve two linear systems on paper, and you were done. In the third task, you had a permutation and you had to sort it using as few cyclic shifts as possible. The last task was about a directed graph with bracket symbols on each edge, and you need to find the length of the shortest path that has a valid sequence of brackets between two vertices. I know it sounds horrible, maybe even impossible. Is it? Well, if you try to solve it in linear time complexity, probably, but then you realize that $n≤200$, and you start believing that the task is solvable! But of course, it’s not because it’s solvable that you solved it, so you still need to figure out what the solution is and to implement it correctly. But after implementing, when you submit, you don’t get any point, and the grader doesn’t tell you if it’s wrong answer, TLE, segfault, or something else. No information. Nothing. You ask if there’s a place where you can see it, but the only answer you get is that no, not on Szkopuł. So, you start wondering if you really want to try to debug your code. Finally, in the last hour, you realize that the leaders added verdicts to the grader! That helps, of course, but it doesn’t solve your problem either. At the end, some of us (Laetitia) solved it and full scored the contest, and the others didn’t.

For lunch, we went to a restaurant a few minutes away from the hotel. There, we all had the dish we chose on Monday, and also a pink soup (made from beetroots) with an egg in it. After lunch, we went back to the hotel for the editorial of the contest, and then a talk about how to share resources in a company and how google decided to give up fairness and started to deal with it as if it was a financial market.

Then we went to some kind of museum, but it only had one painting! But it was a huge circular panorama with a circumference of 114 meters and a height of 15 meters, showing a battle between Polish and Russian troops in 1794. And on the ground in front of the painting, there were objects like fake trees and rocks that were merging with the painting in a way such that you couldn’t know what was real and what was part of the painting. It was really impressive. We also had an audio guide, but because there was only one painting, it was really long and we could realize how important it is in normal museums to take a few seconds break between the explanations when you change rooms.

After that we went back to the hotel for dinner, which consisted mostly of egg sandwiches (we had eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner). Then we did some little ice breakers and then played games. Some of us played Tichu, some others Mao, … Have you ever played brainroted Mao? Well, let me tell you it’s really confusing, even when you know the rules!

Thursday, April 23rd (Ava)

Wooow the first camp where we got enough sleep, crazzzzyyy! As usual we had to be at breakfast at eight which wasn’t really a problem, you’d had eight hours of sleep instead of five. Today was a little bit special. After a great breakfast we had a city tour instead of writing a five hours contest. We were all really sad and confused about it but at least we had a team contest to look forward to. The city tour was great we saw a lots of the old part of Wrocław and the city is really beautiful. It was also nice to talk to the people from the other delegations and to get to know them better. Fun fact Wrocław has over 2000 dwarfs and there’s even an app that shows where they are and lets you count points for finding them. After the city tour, we went for lunch. Of course we had to play Tichu until the food had arrived. After lunch it was time for the contest, we had all been looking forward to: The team contest. We were split into groups of two or three people and we had five hours to solve thirteen problems but only one person was allowed to code. We had a lot of fun! After dinner, we played Tichu again to round off the evening.

Saturday, April 25th (Ava and Seraina)

As usual, we started the day at eight with breakfast, before going to the university at nine to write a contest in a contest environment. Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan at the university. First, we arrived ten minutes late, which is actually on time, but then we had a lot of problems with the computers. For those who wrote the contest with VScode the debugger was not working and there was also an issue with the output. Anyway, with a delay of one hour and fifteen minutes, we started the contest. Thanks to Paulina, we had four great problems. For some of us the contest went great, for others it was one of the worst contests. After five hours of contest, we were really tired and hungry, but fortunately there was pizza. Until the camp’s closing ceremony, we had great discussions with the other delegations. During the closing ceremony, we all received a flower, which made us really happy. In the evening, we had free time, and of course we played Tichu and Blood on the Clocktower. With these games, we ended the camp and went to bed a little too late to wake up at 7:30 the next day.

Sunday, April 26th (Laetitia)

Let's go to the beach!