Italy Camp 2025 Blog

Thursday, 3.4.25 (Jovian)

So began the camp, at Platform 5, Sector D in Geneva. The time was 6:05AM and the train (IC1 for anyone who is interested; I know of at least one such person) was just pulling out of the station. To catch this train, I had woken up at 4:30AM and Andrej had woken up at 5AM; both of us had only managed six hours of sleep the night before (you will notice a recurring theme here). Note that we would have taken a train an hour later except that our planned train from Zurich to Milan had been canceled for some unknown reason. Still better than DB though. This train to Zurich was the first of many, and we were both far too sleepy to do much, so Andrej worked on his history presentation and I just kinda solved combinatorics (hereafter combi) problems for the math olympiad.

At 9:20AM we found Máté, Linus and Cheng at Zurich HB and we all boarded a train (EC for anyone who is interested) bound for Milan. Hongjia joined at Arth-Goldau. Now at this point, you might notice a distinct lack of Tichu. But fear not; it was to happen as Cheng, Linus, Hongjia and Máté decided to start a game of Tichu. Andrej and I, for our part, decided to work out the solutions to the April Fool’s contest, which did not go all that well (what is Majority supposed to be???).

Anyway, we arrived in Milan and now had a free hour because of the cancellation, which we spent eating lunch and discussing with Luca how the backend of the Italian grader needed to be fixed, as well as the way their selection process took two years.

We proceeded onto the train to Florence (Frecciarossa 1000 for anyone interested) which was also fairly uneventful, I think more math and April Fool’s contest stuff took place but I can’t remember from my sleep deprivation… oh yes, and Andrej was going on about how the daily task was solvable with relativity.

At Florence, we boarded our final train, whose platform decided to sneakily change two minutes before departure. I don’t remember the name of the train (for anyone interested) but we got off at Pontedera. The time was 5PM, and now only a single bus ride to Volterra remained.

Haha no, as apparently lots of trains were arriving much later than expected. So we headed to Coop (the red one, not to be confused with Coop, the orange one) to load up on vital resources like water, then decided to be very social and play a game of non-transitive Tichu (more on this later, presumably). At one point we were offered the divine opportunity to drink an apéro, which we very unfortunately had to decline (aw).

At 7:30, it was finally time for the bus ride - a 45-minute twist and turn through the hills that demanded all our willpower not to vomit. It was past 8 by the time we arrived to SIAF and got assigned our dorms. We were all assigned rooms in building 4, so naturally we searched every building except 4 before we were able to find it. It turned out, though, that the room was actually pretty nice even if the TV didn’t support screencasting. Hotel-like service would also be provided (e.g. cleaning the room and changing towels).

We then decided to head to dinner, where we were delighted to find that the food was excellent (that would be an informatics first :wink:); a certain contestant was very happy to notice the pasta. On top of the pasta, there was another course, and a table well-stocked with cake (this would recur for the next few days). We rejoiced at the quality of the food.

Now comes the fun part: we started considering socializing with the Italian participants to get to know them better. Haha no, instead we decided to do math in their presence, in the hope of accumulating some aura in the process. All we got were:

• one Italian participant saying “Hey! You can’t do geo in here!” to which we replied “Yes we can” and the participant left.
• one Italian participant saying “I’ve got no clue but I’ll keep you updated” in response to our attempt to solve USAMO 2025 Problem 5. Soon after (i.e. past 1AM obviously) we went to sleep.

Saturday, 5.4.25 (Máté)

After the Contest on Friday, we could enjoy a day without one. Therefore, we had a morning lecture, which was mostly about graph theory. Then after lunch, there was an editorial for the previous contest and a lesson held by our leaders, Cheng and Linus. We learned about problems with randomized solutions, which was useful for the third contest on monday. In the evening, we went to explore Volterra. We walked around and saw some nice spots, such as the town hall of Volterra or the ruins of a roman theatre. After some time, we stopped for a drink at a bar, which was inside of an old wine cellar. On the way back, we were lucky to see a public performance of artists dancing with fire, supported by a group of drummers.

Sunday, 6.4.25 (Andrej)

We had to wake up even earlier today (sadly this was a recurring trend through the entire camp), since Italian contests always start on time [1]. I took my usual breakfast of two croissants, and it was already time to go to the contest room, except for Máté who decided to revise for his upcoming math exam instead.

I obviously had great contest strategy as always, so when I saw that problem 2 was some shitty task that looked fun I decided I would go and spend the entire contest trying to fullscore it.

1 hour later: nice I have a solution, shouldn’t take more than one hour to implement.

2 hours later: this is fine, it’s only slightly buggy.

3 hours later: why am I still getting 4.5 pts

3.5 hours later: let’s go I can now do the actually nice part of this contest

So as you can see I had a very fun contest, and my contest strategy was, as I already mentioned, perfect, since I somehow got first place…

Everyone was exhausted after this contest (sleep deprivation + solving problems for 5 hours goes together so well), so we were relieved to get lunch and looking forward to enjoy the afternoon since nothing was scheduled. But guess what? Just as we started eating lunch, italian leaders started yelling at us to go take our stuff from the contest room. After a lot of confusion, an Italian participant explained to us that due to unforeseen circumstances they had to reschedule the third contest to today (how did they manage to be even better organised than SOI???). We were all really looking forward to doing yet another 5 hour contest in the same day, and it didn’t get a lot better when we entered the contest room and realised nothing was even set up yet.

Thankfully the contest started on time (in UTC+1:45), and there were absolutely no formatting issues whatsoever with the problem statements. The first problem was a very intricate and challenging optimisation task whose grader definitely wasn’t broken, the second one a relatively easy task about stopping an insurrection (there was even a visualiser that definitely worked flawlessly!), and the third was a completely trivial online convex hull query task. Unfortunately, our intense problem solving was interrupted when the organisers announced to our utter disbelief that it had been a troll contest the whole time…

After this we got an editorial for today’s morning contest, and learned that some italian participants would mock one of their regional contests in the afternoon. We (Jovian and I) thought it might be a good idea, until we got dragged away by Hongjia and two Italian participants who also did the math olympiad to play Set. We spent maybe an hour getting utterly destroyed at that game, until the Italian people left and we started playing non-transitive tichu (a great game when 3 people want to be asocial) until dinner time came.

This evening, I had the great idea to go to sleep “early”, since we had to wake up even earlier for the third contest tomorrow (the real one). This initiative was incredibly successful since we ended up sleeping at 1 am instead of 2 am.

Monday, 7.4.25 (Jovian)

The last day of the camp, Monday started in the same way as Sunday; that is, with a contest. As the final contest of the Italian TST, this was the last chance to clutch up and get to IOI. The stakes were high… just not really for us, notably including Hongjia who “accidentally” overslept her alarm and instead did geometry for the morning (not that I disapprove of the latter or anything). The rest of us proceeded to the contest hall to get ready for the competition, which started an hour earlier than usual at 7:30 rather than 8:30 (probably so we could leave on time, even if I wouldn’t have minded riding trains at 1AM). Also the contest would only last for 4 hours and 30 minutes rather than 5 hours.

As usual, the tasks were quite nice. I can’t discuss what the statements were for confidentiality reasons, but the Swiss team mostly agreed on the beauty of the problems. Anyway, the contest ended at 12 and we went to have lunch, where the IOI team was announced. Congrats to Luca Baglietto for earning the top spot in Italy by a large margin, including by getting 296/300 points on the last day! I almost achieved a similar feat in contest, but I ultimately wasn’t able to because I’m bad at combi. Andrej and me still managed to secure two spots in the top 4 meaning we could go to IOI if we were from Italy.

After lunch, it was time to leave. We had a similar experience to Thursday in that we had to summon large amounts of willpower to combat the urge to vomit as the bus twisted and turned through the hills. Our train left from Pontedera at 2:45PM, and thus began the long journey back home, which was fairly uneventful as everyone was catching up on lost sleep (me included).

In Milan, Andrej and I parted ways with the rest of the Swiss delegation, as it turned out that there was a faster way home through Brig (which makes me wonder why this route didn’t exist for the way there). Notably, in Brig Andrej did not lose the Toblerone (no, I won’t elaborate on this). The camp concluded at pretty much exactly midnight as our train pulled into Geneva.