Sweden Camp 2024 Blog

Saturday, 24.8.2024 (Ursus)

“URRRRRSUS, WA ISCH DA FÜR E FARB?”

If you don’t understand German: That basically means it’s time to get up at 4:30 AM. In thirty minutes, we got up, packed our stuff checked out and went to the train station. We found a wild Johannes during the train-ride, Charlotte (who left us yesterday) waited for us at the airport.

The procedure was fast and painless, we scanned, waited and ate our breakfast at the airport. It was also the birth of the Moo-Moo-Duck, who was (obviously) enslaved by the vendors in some store there! I rescued him (from 30) and took him with me, as a great duck owner I am (even if Johannes doesn’t believe me).

The plane and flight were a short 2 hours. Johannes and I looked at the Egypt-travel-guide to kill some time prepare ourselves for the next week. After the ride, Yaël almost never reappeared from the trip to the toilet (did he get stuck in the toilet or what?), and we made ourselves to Stockholm main station.

There, Charlotte left us all alone (again) and we went visiting the city for an hour. For dinner, we went back to the train-station: There were some, and we ate some wraps and salads, nothing truly special. After that, we tried to find the Swedish people, and they seemed to be on time like the SOI. Harry was there offering sweets (a lot of sweets) and we waited until the rest came. When they came, we went on our way to the Airbnb in which we are going to live for a week.

It was a long way, but when we arrived, well… This house is super fancy! It has a pool outside and a crazy bathroom inside, 20 beds, 2 kitchens, a Sauna (training for Egypt), a big garden (technically 3) and is structured very special but also modern. Exploring the house was certainly a lot of fun. After some time, we had a scavenger hunt, making the best photos. We don’t know what happened to them, but hopefully they will be evaluated at some time. Charlotte eventually came back too.

Now to the important part: We had dinner prepared by the Swedish leaders, and yeah, Fajitas in which we could do our own stuff is nice, but we had 2 white sauces there. One was allegedly good and the other bad, but the rumors were divided in which one was which. So I tried one sauce, which was bland but okayish (I guess) but the other was brutally disgusting (spicy garlic, what a horrid combo). Johannes was like “Nonono, that sauce is really good.” So that’s why I’m writing the blog post now, not because I have to but because I must. We have to send a message to Johannes, the salad-terminator, that this is not acceptable in our culture and morality.

But besides that, we were playing some games, trying out the Xbox there, and taught the Ferdigame to some participants for the rest of the evening, until we went to sleep.

Sunday, 25.8.2024 (Ursus)

After a refreshing night full of sleep, we were awakened by some random Swedish leaders with “Guten Morgen, guten Morgen…” (with loudness felt around 100dB), so no “URRRSUS”-alarm today.

We ate breakfast and soon after, we had our first practice contest. We “solved” day 2 of IOI 2018 and somewhat successful? Could’ve been better but ach, it’s the first real day of this camp. For lunch, we got rice with spicy sauce (why). After that, we went for a short walk to a lake nearby and back, where Johannes gave some high quality house ratings on the way. When we came back, we looked at the contest solutions and had some time upsolving, that means, we played Crazy Time until we had dinner, a nice game where you have to concentrate a lot, so you can’t actually do it.

For dinner, we had smol Hotdogs with some sauces. After the dinner Elias and I went for a little walk in the forest nearby, and we got lost. Actually we didn’t, with our heuristic function called “walk in the right orientation”, we found our way home, of course after we got attacked by a dog.

That was an interesting trip, I got back to an (even crazier) round of Crazy Time, with 3 additional rules since I’ve played at noon (this gets far too complex in time). This game later evolved to a seriously too long game of secret Dictator [1], which is like the Resistance but different (I think Sofie is just a fan of those type of games). We played for far too long (until 23:00 or something), so we quickly went to bad[sic!] afterward (and I for some reason thought it was the best time to write this blog).

Monday, 26.8.2024 (Elias)

Today we were woken up by music again, unfortunately today the music in question was “Guten Morgen, Sonnenschein”, which stayed stuck in my head the entire day. After quickly eating breakfast it was time for another practice contest. Just before starting however, we received today’s cooking schedule over discord. Yaël, to his dismay, found his name on the list. As he takes the practice contests very seriously, and he didn’t want to miss part of an old IOI, he convinced the camp organizer to move him to another day. Crisis averted… (almost). Me and Ursus were also on the schedule, but we didn’t care as much, so we helped with lunch (meatballs and pasta).

After lunch we went outside for a walk in the forest. Despite losing some contestants in the forest, the trip went quite well. Later we had a solution presentation and then some lectures. We only half listened, as we were also busy upsolving our buggy code. Then it was time to cook dinner: spaghetti bolognese. It took alot longer than would have been necessary, due to accidentally turning off the stove for the spaghetti and failing to cut the carrots properly. But at long last dinner was ready. Afterwards there was no time to rest, it was back to another lecture about bitsets until bedtime.

Tuesday 27.08.2024 (Yaël)

“GOMORO + something Swedish I can’t remember and probably the first word is wrong too”

If you don’t understand Swedish did you honestly think I would be able to translate this? And honestly it’s less of a pain if we do not know, as this is way better than “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” (but

[2] not compared to “URRRRRRSUS”)

The first half of the day was almost analogous too the others, we wrote an old IOI. The only differences were: 1. I was not blinded by the sun, as I found out that sitting inside did help on that front 2. A very uncool output only task [3] Also, I solved a problem by bashing partwise convex functions + trinary search on it which was way more fun then just boringly using better linear DP. Elias managed to be in gold medal range. Will he be able to repeat this feat at this IOI? [4] The output only task does not deserve to be elaborated.

For lunch, we got abandoned by Charlotte (you may see a recurring pattern here) (@Charlotte if you want to argue on this point, feel free to write a footnote [5]). I don’t know what the the food was supposed to be, but we didn’t have time to find out (and Johannes didn’t have time to get a second serving!), as at some point someone asked

Aren’t we supposed to leave in 10 minutes?

So we did $\pm 10 \%$[6]. Again, Charlotte abandoned us (a very recurring pattern). Because of all this stress, something that should absolutely never happen at SOI did occur: We forgot to bring our Tichu! So we got bored during the hour we needed to get there. The swedes played some weird game with singing and slapping hands we didn’t understand, so we didn’t join in.

At last, we arrived at our destination: The Laserdome The Lasercastle (this was wrongly written on the schedule, so apple maps would have led us to the wrong place again). There, I experienced stress level similar to an IOI contest and competed with Johannes for the last place (he won). But some people seemed to have fun shooting others, so that’s okay.

After two rounds and many sweaty shirts, we were sadly forced to leave. Some participants tried to form a pentagram and failed, so we just sat in a park waiting. To sweeten things up, we got some ice creams [7]. We got three (the chocolate ones, not the mangos), even if we didn’t run when Joshua told everyone who wanted more to compete for them.

We then could go back to the house. After half the ride, we decided to walk back the rest instead of staying with the group and waiting 10 minutes. We had way to much fun reading the three letters on the car license plates. We got back first. This had nothing to do with the Swedish leaders getting out at the wrong station.

After solution presentations, a round of Ferdibugging tasks [8] and yet another round of Charlotte leaving us alone “Because the music was too loud”(an extremely recuring pattern), we got food, a potato soup, at 9 pm. Afterwards, in a final round of Ferdibugging, I managed to fix all the bugs in my “Teams” submission. Only the TLE left, but

it would have passed on the original grader. Some last rounds of Crazy Time later, I got to bad.

Wednesday, 28.8.2024 (Charlotte, Johannes)

Thursday, 29.8.2024 (Ursus)

Ach, what is there to tell in the morning? The leaders tried to wake us up with their “gomorrow” and similar songs, but we had the “URRSUS” before. All in all, we were already awake.

I took 2 slices of bread with cheese before we made us ready for the today’s practice contest. We solved IOI 2017 day 2, so we actually completed whole IOI 2017 this week! The task were certainly very interesting, but my implementation could’ve been (very) better. It was a bit weird though that there were 2 interactive tasks from 3 tasks.

Now to prove that karma exist. Let Yaël have changed his kitchen duty (with Eliasz[sic!]) on Monday. Now, because he had to do it today, he even wanted less because the tasks were fun. From these statements and the definition of karma, we have proven that karma exists. $\square$

The “arguably best food of the camp” in the making.

On Lunch, we got arguably the best food of the week: Pancakes. Not only one, two, three, no: A nearly infinite supply of them! With that refreshing meal devoured, we had solution presentation and a very calming meditation break (which wasn’t totally funny at all, mmhhhmmm). After that, we had the active-interactive-activity [9]. Given a task in which you are given the ability to ask queries, run from your team to the leaders to ask queries and back (90+ times) until you solve the problem.

The first task was a simple secret number task, a good warm up. The second task was harder, we had to find out a tree by asking the diameter of a subset of that tree. Brute forcing would’ve been the best strategy, but for some reason we thought this would be too easy, ach.

And of course there was the third task, which was just totally weird (not to mention the rain and thunder which interrupted everything). So many of us went back into the house and I went playing the crazy “Crazy Time” game. It was around 19:00 when we started (Dinner was at 22:00 obviously), and it was around 03:20 when we ended playing. We got some Salagna [10] for Dinner. The Chef Rasmus also gave me some yummy and raw salagna-plates to eat [11].

So this is technically Friday, but I don’t care. While Yalül and Elaisz, went to sleep at a reasonable time, a lot of the Swedish people stayed up to watch the movies “Saw” and “Saw 2” or however it’s spelled (I guess, nobody ever saw this movie [12]), and I just had nothing better to do than to write this blog.

$<4$ hours of sleep is enough… right [13]?

Friday, 30.8.2024 (Elias)

This morning was identical to all the others: we did an old contest and then had lunch. But what we did in the afternoon was the highlight of the week (in my opinion).

After taking public transport for about an hour we arrived at a pier in Stockholm where we had rented kayaks. After a short introduction about how to paddle, we grouped ourselves into pairs of two. I teamed up with Johannes, one of our leaders, Ursus and Yaël paired up and Charlotte, our second leader, got into a kayak with another Swedish girl. (The Ursus-Yaël kayak spent most of its time trying to flip other people’s kayaks) After paddling back and forth in the starting area a few times, Johannes and I joined a few other people in heading out to the main waterway. There we paddled for about 40 minutes past the houses and under a highway bridge before we turned back.

After first getting lost, we headed back to the pier where we started with 50 minutes of our 2 hours left. We then decided to head down another river until we got to a main part of stockholm, quite close to where we had arrived on the first day. We saw an interesting looking church, so we paddled over to it before realizing it was actually a mosque. While heading back, we encountered a passenger ship, but we kept to the right, as the kayak guys had instructed us, and we were fine.

After we got back to the original pier, we waited for the last people to arrive and then all walked to an asian restaurant for dinner. Ursus realized that he wouldn’t survive in China as he couldn’t get his chopsticks to work. After some ribs arrived though, I finally gave up as well and went to get us some forks. The dinner was very good, even though I bit on something once that made my mouth feel like it was on fire. After dinner we headed back to our house for our last full night of sleep before Egypt.