Marco's Blog

Introduction to Programming Using Python

2009-08-02T14:41:00.003+02:00

Just under a month ago I tossed the idea around of running a Saturday course to teach high school kids some programming. The idea was to take the new batch from the UCT Maths Circle and give them some exposure to programming and introduce the keen ones to our UCT Algorithm Circle. Back then I had no idea it would turn into this:

When I realised the number of new kids coming from the UCT Maths Circle might be too small, I decided to open it up for application from anyone with limited or no programming experience. All we asked for was a 100 word motivation of why they should be invited and an optional recommendation from a teacher to strengthen their application. I approached the Computer Olympiad office for a list of email addresses and postal addresses of the schools that had entered the Computer Olympiad before. We emailed about 90 schools and posted to about 60 schools with no idea of what to expect.

The advertising was sent through during the school holidays, so nothing really happened for some time. When schools started on Tuesday 28 July though, they started coming in slowly and some of the applications looked very promising. It was around this time that I started thinking of how many we could accept: I settled on 30 and asked 3 other students to help lecture/tutor. By the end of the first week of school though, applications had started flying in like mad. By the end of Monday we had received about 60 applications and they were still coming in. If we stuck at accepting 30 we would have had a shit time turning away some strong applications. Rob to the rescue as we got a fourth lecturer which allowed me to increase capacity to 40. More kept rolling in, including one application arriving on the morning of the course!

We eventually ended up inviting 46, with the expectation that at least 5 wouldn't pitch. We underestimated their enthusiasm: one fell ill, another had a last minute commitment; everyone else pitched! Even after the first day, only one kid fell ill and the rest all returned. Unfortunately a group of four girls had to leave early to catch a lift and another left as she was falling behind. Everyone else stuck it through the whole way. Not something I could possibly have expected! But it means we did something right, right? :)

We chose to run the whole course in the computer lab so that they could run short examples as we taught them things. It really worked well as we could immediately see if they were struggling on something and we never once lost them badly. We could get them to run bits of code to see for themselves what they did and then expand on how it worked.

Taking a step back a bit, on Thursday morning I got a bit of a scare. One of our lecturers had caught a bad dose of the flu, so I ran around trying to find a replacement. Fortunately some students lurking around in the Computer Science building at the time offered a hand and I split the load across three of them. I thank them all mightily for helping out at such short notice. They did a fantastic job, as did all the others that gave a helping hand. In the end it was myself and Michiel Baird doing all the admin work; the two of us, Ben Steenhuisen and Julian Kenwood doing the lecturing; then Jason Brownbridge, Bertus Labuschagne and his brother Phil and Kosie van der Merwe helped out with tutoring, answering the kids' questions; Brent Benade helped order pizza for everyone, a rather nasty job.

When the kids started arriving there was quite a lot of tension in the air, which was to be expected. We planned for this and tried to make sure that we had at least two from each school, so that there was a good chance each kid knew someone else. A number of our lecturers and tutors are great at throwing humour around, which helped ease the tension really well. By the end of the first day (3 hours) most of them had opened up and had no problem asking for help.

The topics we taught, in the order we taught them:

What is programming?
Using the Python interpreter
Input and output
Variables, operators and basic data types
Boolean expressions and conditionals
While loop
Lists
For loop
Strings
Writing functions

That was all covered in 9 hours. Bear in mind that these are grade 7, 8 and 9 kids (and a couple grade 10's) with mostly no prior programming experience at all! Now read the list above again. From what I can remember of my high school experience, what we taught them in 9 hours was equivalent to what is covered in the entire grade 10 and 11 IT syllabus minus files and gui's, and obviously all the theory crap.

They all did exceptionally well. Now it's time for them to write the test we gave them and we'll invite the best ones to attend weekly 90 minute classes to further teach them more on programming, especially focusing on improving their problem solving skills. What's great for them too is that they also have the opportunity of being invited to UCT Maths Circle, our partner in crime.

There is one thing we feel exceptionally guilty about. We received over 80 applications, but only had space for 46. Reading each and every one of those motivations of the kids we had to turn away makes me feel very sad. Therefore there is the possibility of us running another course like this in the near future. If you are interested in attending a future course, please contact me. We also run another class on data structures and algorithms for those who have a strong grasp of programming, are bored in class and want a challenge.

UCT Algorithm Circle

2009-02-01T16:01:00.000+02:00

After much grinding away, we had our first class of the UCT Algorithm Circle this past Thursday. We invited 32 of the most talented school kids we could find in the Cape Town area and invited them to some training. We're also slowly inviting kids outside of Cape Town to train online. We're teaching them from the very basics of programming right through to the advanced algorithms and data structures required for the IOI.

For the first class, we introduced the basics of Python. We were amazed at how quickly the kids caught on. After a 20 minute lecture and 60 minute practical session they were understanding operations, variables, stdio and more. The majority of these kids are in grades 9 and 10, and amazingly half are girls.

If things continue at the rate they're going now, this could provide a serious boost to our IOI results in upcoming years. We've always been welcome to the idea of training a wider audience, but finding the talented kids and getting them interested has always been a brick wall we couldn't knock down. This time though, collaboration with one of the people involved in the teaching kids for the IMO has seriously helped change all that.

To see the kids we have, just check out some of their introductions in this thread to see what they're capable of.

Prototype

2009-02-01T15:44:00.001+02:00

After completing the meat of my background chapter in December, I spent the most part of January working on a prototype for my masters project. So now I get to start showing off all my pretty pictures. :)

First of all, I should mention that I am writing an extension for VMD, so I most certainly did not develop what you see below from the ground up. In an effort to simplify the process of porting my work to other molecular visualisation applications (e.g. PyMol), I decided to do all the core computation in an application-independent C++ module which communicates with an application-specific plugin via sockets. For VMD, this plugin is written in Tcl, which I have come to hate.

When you first launch VMD, you get a simple protein. Launch my extension and it churns away, calculating conservation scores (dummy values for now) and the solvent accessible surface of the protein. The protein is then coloured based on the conservation scores, which you can see below for a sample protein.

After visualising the conservation scores, the final application will visualise its prediction of binding sites. The user will then be given the option of doing further analysis of the binding sites. We're currently considering two forms of analysis: select a residue and predict what a binding site containining this residue would look like; and select some residues and predict what the binding sites would look like if we excluded these residues from the predicted binding sites. Below is a sample of user-selected residues (in red).

Then the user can choose to visualise the solvent accessible surface. We calculate this surface using marching tetrahedra to extract an isosurface and kd-trees to calculate the isovalues. The surface is coloured by the conservation scores, just like in the previous shots. Currently I don't have residue selection working in this mode, although I plan on doing so. The meat of my computation will be using the conservation scores and the solvent accessible surface to predict the binding sites.

Then finally, VMD is a very feature-full tool and least of which you can do is rotate the protein for a view of the entire protein as you can see below. There is much more you can do with it, but I'll leave interested readers to explore themselves.

Next week I'm off to the Afrigraph Conference in Pretoria, after which I have to attend this 6 week bioinformatics course in Stellenbosch. Lectures 09:00-18:00 every day for 6 weeks. Not sure how I'm going to last.

Planning for PhD

2008-12-11T00:27:00.001+02:00

After the painful experience of seeing my masters supervisor resign a few months ago, things have been turning out rather nicely. A huge advantage of working with my new supervisor is that she has good international collaboration. Last month I met the lead developer (from Illinois) of VMD, one of the visualisation programs I'll be writing my masters project for. This week it got even better!

This week, Dr Robert Best is visiting from Cambridge. It is looking increasingly more likely as time passes that he will be my PhD supervisor. Yes, that is correct...I am this close to getting the amazing opportunity of studying my PhD at Cambridge! The only hurdle at the moment is funding. I've been very slowly releasing news of this, as I first got word of the possibility around the time I started my new masters project a couple months ago. This is entirely thanks to my masters supervisor, Michelle Kuttel, who put me in contact with Dr Best.

Yesterday I met him for the first time, and we discussed potential research topics. The deadline for applications is due very soon, so for the moment we're focussing on a particular topic that looks very promising. Summarising very crudely, it's about taking advantage of both the speed of coarse-grained simulations and the accuracy of fine-grained simulations to produce fast, but accurate simulations of biomolecules. The main question here is how to swap between different representations of the system. Another possibility we have been looking into is furthering his research in reaction coordinates, which he summarises on his website.

By the way, this is the reason I am trying to finish my masters in a year. The year starts in October at Cambridge, and starting when their year begins makes things much simpler.

Proposal Presentation

2008-11-13T00:10:00.001+02:00

My proposal presentation went really well today. I was concerned that the biology jargon would get in the way of the meat of the project, but we got past that. Edwin is my second reader and he provided some very useful criticism. Main thing I'm glad about is he suggested we remove the user testing aspect, which was always my least favourite. He also picked up a few bits of jargon we need to describe better come the thesis, but nothing major. The last thing he picked on was a concern I raised with Alex (my co-supervisor) previously anyway, which means I'll be paying more attention to it.

So on from here we go. Next step is to continue with the background reading and starting of the background chapter. The plan is to wrap up with the bulk of the background reading by the end of this year and then dig deep into the project. I have a tight schedule as I plan to finish up by October next year. I've had very contradictory reactions to this, some saying it's quite doable, others laughing it off. We'll see.

Masters Milestone #1: Proposal

2008-11-11T00:28:00.001+02:00

If official milestones were all that counted, I'd be about to exceed progress of the project I previously spent six months on within the first six weeks of my new project. My proposal is all written up, gone through the shredding of two wild supervisors and I'm ready to present it to the department this Wednesday. Woohoo!!

It's insane thinking how fast things can move when everything just works. From the way things ran in my last project to this now, wow how things can change over such a short period of time. I have to thank my supervisors Michelle and Alex, they've really provided great support.

So anyway, Wednesday 13:00 in CS303. My title is "Development and Validation of a Visualization Tool for Predicting Protein-Protein Interfaces". If you're interested in scientific applications of Computer Science, this is a good example. It also involves quite a bit of computer graphics.

Juniors in the South African Computer Olympiad

2008-10-31T23:39:00.001+02:00

A concern I have always had with the South African Computer Olympiad (SACO) is the lack of juniors (grades 10 and below) making it through to the third round and eventually the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). A glance at the SACO winner archive makes this quite evident. The only person that has won a medal in grade 9 or below (and hence stood a chance of making the IOI) was the well-known Bruce Merry.

Why do we have this problem? The obvious problem is that IT is only offered from grade 10 and it's nearly impossible for someone to pick up enough within those first few months in time to make the final round of the SACO. However, it is quite common to get those who taught themselves programming in the earlier grades yet only make the final round in there last one or two years. Vastly different situation to the Maths camp, where grade 8s and 9s are a common occurence.

Today we made a giant step in improving the situation. It goes back to little over a year ago during the final round of last year's SACO. We had three juniors (grades 8-10) joining us on-site for a junior competition in which they couldn't win anything. One of these kids did so well on the first day we invited him to write the senior paper the following day. Unfortunately as he only had a single day's worth of points to stand on, it was near impossible for him to win a medal and a place in the IOI training squad.

This gave us reason to invite a larger number to participate in the training. Due to a strictly worded rule, only the medallists could compete for a place in the IOI. Along with this and our limited budget we had to place several restrictions on those outside the top six, but we invited the next six best non-matrics to attend the training camps of which five accepted the offer. Things ran very well as the larger squad resulted in more discussion as well as pushed the top guys to perform better. Yet still, there was this lack of competition amongst those we called the squad++ as they had nothing to aim for but goals they set themselves.

For this year's final round the rule in questioned was worded more openly. The final round this year was the most competative from recent years and yet we still ended up with a new grade 9 and new grade 10 just missing the medal positions! It's been a long month, but today they were finally accepted into our first ever larger-than-usual squad. We now have ten highly competative kids in our squad, with the distribution being three grade 12, five grade 11, one grade 10 and one grade 9. All are elegbile to make the IOI team next year, and should Charl who's the one in grade 9 make the team he will be our youngest team member after Bruce! Now that they've shown us what they can do it's up to us to train them and make sure we continue to work on the great results.

I have some other plans to further increase the junior numbers. Now that we have these guys as role models it will be easier to catch the attention of other juniors and I don't plan on missing this opportunity. I already have the names of some current very capable grade 8s and 9s wanting to take a shot at the SACO next year. It's going to be a fun and interesting year to come!

ACM ICPC South African 2008

2008-10-12T19:59:00.003+02:00

Yesterday UCT hosted 22 teams from UCT, Stellenbosch and UWC for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. This year we had three new helpers from this years World Finals team that can no longer compete. We did a lot of preparation on our side for the event, but as we had the SACO just two weeks ago we didn't contribute any problems.

The contestants started arriving from 07:30 for a large breakfast we prepared for them. They thoroughly enjoyed all the food and chowed it far quicker than we could've imagined! Thanks to Chris Parker and Bertus Labuschagne for preparing the breakfast and snacks during the contest.

While the contestants ate and I handled registrations, Ian Tunbridge was in charge of preparing the lab with the team flags and balloons. For the first time we decided to blow up all the balloons in advance. Given the number of problems solved last year this seemed like a good idea, but alas as you'll find out soon enough it was not.

At 08:30 we started moving the contestants down to the lab, let them login and waited for the practice contest to start. After the practice contest the Nigerian server went offline due to power cuts, which pushed the start 45 minutes late. The start wasn't as pretty as we had hoped for, but things finally got underway at around 09:45. It took some time for the first problem to be solved, so I had plenty time to catch a before shot:

We put together a large team of UCT students no longer eligible to compete. We had Timothy, Migael, Tamara, Harry, James, Robert, myself and for a brief period Ian. Our first goal was to check the problems and send in any clarification requests early, our second goal was to beat Bruce who was doing them solo. Unfortunately we failed at our second goal, but then again Bruce cheated. :P We got A, B and D within little over an hour. We then got stuck for quite some time trying to match what was actually expected in F but got it eventually. Harry was working on C, but very quickly hit a dead-end as he was getting wrong answer. We asked numerous clarification requests and submitted countless times before finally getting it correct. We tried too hard on E, realising too late that a brute force solution would work in time (Bruce beat us to it and solved all six!).

This was our team near the beginning, minus me who took the photo:

More than an hour into the competition, ʇlnɐɟƃ3s got the first problem at the UCT site:

Things never really took off for the full five hours. The number of problems solved was very low with only 14 of about 70 teams solving anything at all, only two of them solving more than two problems. Going into the last hour Tuks3 were leading on time and the scoreboard stopped updating. This is when the local teams started pulling away, with team ʇlnɐɟƃ3s solving a third, followed shortly by Code Red from Stellenbosch also solving a third. At this point both teams were extremely close on time, but UCT's ʇlnɐɟƃ3s was just ahead.

It was in the last 15 minutes that ʇlnɐɟƃ3s closed the door on everyone else by solving their fourth and final problem. No-one was able to pass them in the final minutes. The end results were:

ʇlnɐɟƃ3s of UCT (Keegan Carruthers-Smith, Max Rabkin, Saadiq Moolla)
Code Red of Stellenbosch (Ralf Kistner, Dirk-B Coetzee, Petrus Theron)
Tuks3 of Pretoria
Team LOL of UCT (Julian Kenwood, Richard Baxter, Mike Talbot)
OMG Raptors of UKZN

With only 15 problems solved at the UCT site (23 overall) we had 117 inflated balloons left over. What to do with 117 balloons? Well we let the contestants take them home, and this was the result :)

After the contest we went to Primi Piatti in Cavendish for lunch. Unfortunately before we could go we needed to clean up the mess the contestants left behind. Yes messy bunch...Once the lab was all cleared up we headed off and were just about the last to arrive.

After lunch, which was staggered by table for some reason (the kitchen couldn't handle the numbers or something) we had a little awards ceremony.

3rd at UCT site and 4th overall: Team LOL (Richard, Mike, Julian)

2nd overall: Code Red (Dirk-B, Petrus, Ralf)

1st overall: ʇlnɐɟƃ3s (Saadiq, Keegan, Max)

Contest helpers: Marco, Harry, Timothy, Tamara, Migael
Missing: Chris, Bertus, Ian

Problems, detailed standings, statistics and more are available here.

Renewed Masters

2008-10-09T00:25:00.002+02:00

It's been two months now since I heard the news that would result in drastic changes in my life. I never realised just how bad the news was that day. It took some time to sink in. When it did, however, that was the start of a very stressful period for me. I'm talking about the day my supervisor resigned.

There's a lot of details behind what happened, but for personal and ethical reasons I have chosen not to comment about it much online. It is for the same reason I have held off posting about what has been happening until now. Now that things are settling down it's time to start coming out with the news though. Many of my friends have known about this for a while now, it's just time I announce it publically.

So my supervisor resigned. Within a couple days I started talking around and within a week I was discussing the possibility of a new project. Ironically the first person I spoke to, Michelle Kuttel, is now my new supervisor. The main reason for the change of topic is that no-one else at UCT was strongly grounded in the field of my existing project. While it meant essentially writing off six months of hard work, I had to consider my long-term goals. It sucks, it really really sucks...but I don't regret making the decision, not yet. It's been a long, stressful ordeal, but I feel I've made a good decision.

My new project is in bioinformatics and is on protein-protein interface prediction. It's a graphics-heavy project with the new field of computational biology to learn. It's a drastic change from my previous project, but I have reasons for doing so. The plan is to get down to serious work quickly and get wrap up end of September 2009. It's a very quick masters, but after the huge setback I'm seriously determined to get this done and with my supervisor believing it's possible I will get it done.

Apologies for keeping this so brief, but I don't want to say too much publically about this. You'll be hearing more about my new topic though, no reason to keep that quiet! I plan on putting together my proposal by the beginning on next month and giving my proposal presentation a week or so after.

South African Computer Olympiad 3rd Round 2008

2008-10-02T23:35:00.004+02:00

The final round of the South African Computer Olympiad took place this past weekend. This was the first year it's been run since Bruce and Carl left UCT at the end of last year. While we sorely missed them and noticed how much we had previously taken for granted, we managed really well.

There were 16 contestants, 7 of which had gone through squad training over the past year so we had a nice split between newcomers and oldies. Two months ago I setup a Google Group for them to ask questions and discuss the 3rd round. Given the large number of oldies this turned into an exceptionally useful discussion forum with the oldies asking advanced questions which in turn gave the newcomers a target to aim for. They could see what was out there and it really boosted their urge to learn. Over the past two months there have been nearly 400 messages posted!

The contestants all arrived on Friday evening, when we had an introduction session and went through the rules and environment. This was followed by the classical pizza-on-campus supper. After having helped most of them through the forum I was anxious to meet the new guys, but the swarm of unrecognisable faces threw me off guard, especially as we were running around frantically sorting out a couple last minute things. Fortunately I was able to get to know most of them over the weekend.

On Saturday morning we started them off with a practice session so they could become familiar with the environment. One advantage of having the forum was that we also for the first time got them all to use the handing system before arriving, even going as far as providing a time-constrained practice contest for them. This meant that most of the time was spent getting familiar with the setup of the PC's, which wasn't much to get used to and so they got bored very quickly (bored for these guys means they were coding up quite advanced algorithms we have never taught them). The only issue we had was with Dev-CPP setting folders to read-only and saying it couldn't save, which we eventually fixed.

While they went off for lunch, we setup the lab for the start of the first round of competition. A first for this year again is that we logged them in and pre-loaded all the IDE's and such (the network is so slow we have scripts that copy everything onto the local disk), which took more time than we had anticipated so most of us got cold food. We're supposed to have an admin account that can wipe their accounts clean, but the network admins messed that up and it's one of few things we forgot to test beforehand. This meant we had to wipe the accounts manually.

The first round of competition started well. We had given them two easier problems and a challenging graph theory problem. Our goal was to get them a good starting score and letting them have sufficient time to have a real crack at the nastiest problem of the weekend. The plan worked well, besides us underestimating the difficult of the second problem. The scores were very high, with the average for this single day higher than the average over both days last year. While the problems were slightly easier this year, the major reason for the difference was the much stronger contestants. We were seeing the results of a larger training squad over the past year combined with the amazingly fruitful forum.

There was one single issue we've had haunting us for about six months now, but which has affected us very little prior to this weekend. One of our grading servers keeps on crashing, and we only recently discovered that a CPU error is resulting in a kernel panic. Alongside this the hard drives our only other grading server were stolen (long story!) and with everything else we were working on we never got around to finding new drives and reinstalling in time (we got close though!). With the introduction of detailed feedback and grouped test data increasing the load on the grading server it starting crashing a lot more frequently, to the point where we had to be careful and coax it along, rebooting it a number of times. Being South Africans we quickly improvised, using a red packet of sweets to indicate the server was down and a green packet when it was up.

Once the first round of competition was over we started a problem discussion lead by the problem authors. We describe the expected solutions, which is a great learning experience for the contestants. While that was going on we started the evaluation of the day's submissions. Unfortunately the grading server really started freaking out under the load we were putting it under. Combined with many more test cases than we previously used due to grouped test data, the evaluation took over two hours! When we finally got the marks to the contestants they were mostly all very happy with the higher-than-usual marks.

We then went out for supper to the Spur where I had a very chatty group at my table. It's always wonderful have conversations with them about their experiences in school and in the competition. It's the best way to discover what areas need improving and potential solutions to them. It's amazing hearing stories of how students at schools without Computer Studies quite randomly happen to come across the SACO, and also quite sad to think of all those who miss out.

Sunday morning was an early one for us as we had to prepare for a 09:00 start. While the problems were busy printing Keegan and I moved the grading server closer to the aircon in the hope that it would reduce the frequency of crashes. We then went down to the lab to log everyone on, clean the accounts and do some other stuff to make the contestants' lives easier. We started a few minutes late again, but it went very well from there on. We had very few crashes of the grading server, helped in part by further decreasing the load we put on it. So it was a much more peaceful day for us coaches (this just half of us):

The problems for the second round of competition were considerably harder and we noticed the effect from early on. The easiest problem was very easy to get a wrong answer on as it looked like greedy was correct. Fortunately most of them quickly moved onto the other two problems, one a competitive data problem and the other a quite challenging greedy problem with a 70% Dynamic Programming solution. The race for first place was extremely tight up until the last half hour when the eventual winner zoomed ahead. It's always fascinating watching the rush of submissions coming in at the end, which can sometimes shuffle things up quite significantly.

Evaluation of the second day was much, much faster due to several reasons. This meant that we had the results ready and printed immediately after lunch. The contestants were very anxious to see their results and as much as we try keep them from discussing them within a few minutes nearly everyone knew who had come where. The medal winners were:

1. Francois Conradie winning R36,000
2. Robert Ketteringham winning R24,000
3. Kosie van der Merwe winning R24,000
4. Haroon Moolla winning R2,000 (used Java)
5. Schalk-Willem Kruger winning R12,000
6. Michiel Baird winning R12,000

The final Python prize of R10,000 went to Gwylim Ashley. The results were extremely strong this year and the competition very tight. Just looking at how this years IOI contestants Robert and Schalk-Willem were beaten by others shows how hard everyone worked for this competition. The results were also nicely separated with no positions at the top very tight, and the scores at the lower end weren't dismally low as they have often been in the past (another sign of how strong the competition was!)

Some random statistics about the medallists: Kosie is the only one not wearing glasses. Four are Afrikaans-speaking (reading Afrikaans code isn't fun, fortunately only Francois does this!). Half are in grade 11 and can return next year, including Francois. Robert and Schalk-Willem participated in the IOI this year, and Haroon was invited but withdrew. Besides Michiel, all made the final round last year.

Rondebosch Boys' High School has had a strong performance in the SACO over the past years. Being the first Bosch boy to make the final round and leading the Scientific Committee, this makes me extremely proud. This year the boys didn't disappoint, grabbing 2nd and 4th places as well as one non-medallist position. Here's me with the Bosch contestants (Haroon, Robert, me, Roland):

The Western Cape as a whole has also produced the largest number of final round participants in recent years. This year we trumped big time though, with 10 of the 16 contestants. Of the rest, three were from Gauteng, one from the North West and one from Namibia. Why not share that fabulous Western Cape photo then? One of the Cape contestants is missing from this photo.

And while I'm at it I might as well give the lonely out-of-towners some love and care :)

Left to right: Divan, Heinrich, Graham, Bennie, Sheldon, Michiel, Kosie, Haroon, Gwylim, Francois, James, Roland, Charl, Schalk-Willem, Robert

After the photo session they had an opportunity to check on their results and raise any appeals. Fortunately we had none, which is always a great sign and a relief. Once that was over we could rest in peace knowing that the five weeks of hard work we put into the problems yielded no problems besides two minor clarification requests.

Very quickly the attention switched to Open Arena, yes they start earlier every year! Some day we need to start a new game, this is getting boring Ben. Graham also tried working on a visualisation tool for the data problem, but when I saw him trying I quickly told him us coaches already had one and I showed it to them. After there hour of fun we had pizza and watched some Fawlty Towers and Thin Blue Line.

Monday was their last day. It was supposed to begin with a tour of the Center for High Performance Computing, but due to the political situation in the country and the resignation of the Minister of Science this was cancelled at the last minute. We couldn't find anything to replace it in time so they had a late morning and arrived on campus at 12:30 when I took them for some campus food. It was another opportunity to have some good discussion time with them.

At 14:00 they had an hour with Michelle Kuttel, student advisor at UCT. She went through the Computer Science streams and courses at UCT as well as touching on a few other areas. I then took them over to the Robotics Lab where one of the engineers gave them a tour of the lab. The tour of UCT ended with a visit to the Virtual Reality Room where they were shown some demo's of current and past masters/phd projects.

At the end of it all it started raining and they needed a lift down to the bed and breakfast. Fortunately two of the other coaches were available to help with lifts, but the rain proved an interesting challenge: how to get 13 people down to the B&B using three cars parked in different parking lots while getting the least wet. After getting them all down there to prepare for the awards ceremony, we had to get them all to Kelvin Grove. Fortunately we were just able to squeeze in a single trip there as opposed to the planned double trip.

It was the first time I had been to Kelvin Grove and I was very pleased with it. I was also very happy to see my old headmaster from school attend the awards ceremony for the first time. This was the first time I can even remember talking to him. He was most impressed with the continuous success of Rondebosch at the SACO. Prof John Webb was also a surprise to see, he heads the Mathematics Olympiad. I also got the opportunity to meet Bennie and Michiel's parents, two of the top newcomers. There were many other people I met, but to list them would be silly as I'd miss out on so many.

The awards ceremony was very formal as usual, with guest speakers from Standard Bank and Microsoft. Fortunately they weren't all that boring, but one or two did drag on a bit long. When we finally got around to the announcement of the results it all flew by so quickly. It was great hearing such positive feedback from the contestants and their parents. Before I knew it, it was over and people had started leaving. I even missed out on the now mandatory official Rondebosch photo.

And that's the end of the beginning. Yes, now we just need to select the training squad (medallists are already guaranteed a place in the squad, but we're hoping we can invite more). We then put them through a rigorous training process which we use to select four of them for the International Olympiad in Informatics to be held in Bulgaria in August 2009. I look forward to the year ahead of working with this great bunch!

Huge thanks to the other members of the Scientific Committee who helped make this one of the smoothest SACO 3rd rounds I think we've ever run. Max helped out a lot with the general admin as well as setting a problem. Keegan took on a lot of the technical work, as well as taking over Harry's problem. Ben organised the junior contest, with some help mostly from Timothy, Julian and Richard. Richard was great at proof-reading the problems and being very nit-picky about them. Migael took on the mission of setting the data problem and helped out a lot over the weekend. Harry in setting his lovely problem, but forcing me to rewrite the problem text. Mark, the new addition to the group helped me set the easy problem. Nicholas, Bruce and Carl also helped out a lot with checking the problems and all of them are far away so they all helped out online only. Tamara was also the first beta tester we've had, a new idea picked up from the IOI. Michelle and Peter helped with some last minute proof-reading. I hope I never missed out on anyone. :)

South African Computer Olympiad Online Contest

2008-09-10T01:16:00.000+02:00

Back by popular demand! :-P For the second time we will be running an online version of the South African Computer Olympiad and we would like to invite anyone who is interested to take part. The SACO is an IOI-style contest run over two days. The contest will run

Saturday 27 September at 13:30 to 18:30 SAST (11:30 to 16:30 GMT)
Sunday 28 September at 10:00 to 15:00 SAST (08:00 to 13:00 GMT)

We will also run a Future Stars division which will consist of easier problems targeted at, but not limited to, juniors. For an idea of the difficulty level of this division see the problems from last year at http://olympiad.cs.uct.ac.za/old/saco2007/

Register now at https://olympiad.cs.uct.ac.za/contests/saco-2008/?page=register (accounts from one of our previous contests should still work)

More information is available at http://olympiad.cs.uct.ac.za/online-contest.html

Looking forward to challenging you guys! ;-)

IOI Day 5: Contest, Conference and VIP Dinner

2008-08-28T00:29:00.001+02:00

As you will have seen from my previous posts the second round of competition took place on Wednesday. Well, actually it is all over now and I am back home in South Africa. Things just got too hectic and sleep became a higher priority than blogging. I'll be going back and blogging about what happened for the last few days.

Day 5 started with the second and final round of competition, which from seeing the problems the night before I considered easier than those from the first round. Our guys went into this round still standing a fair chance given the low scores from round one. I was not to see them until it was all over though as us team leaders were in quarantine.

The day started with an early breakfast. I had my presentation to give at the IOI Conference and I wasn't going to be late. I was scheduled for 10:30, the second slot. I arrived early to get my presentation onto the laptop they were using, however, after much waiting no laptop arrived. They wouldn't let us use the main PC that was there as it was connected to the network so we had to wait for a laptop to come, which took a while. During this time I was told that the first speaker was busy in a meeting and so I was to go first. As if the nerves couldn't get any worse they finally brought the laptop and the first person to copy his slides was having difficulties, but luckily I was able to step in and resolve them.

Finally my presentation was underway. The paper I presented, titled "Challenges Running a Computer Olympiad in South Africa" is available here and my slides here. It went well and timing was spot-on 20 minutes. The questions that followed were most interesting, although I must admit I have forgotten most of them. Wolfgang was interested in the decline in numbers for the second round upon introducing the new first round format. A couple people were interested in what we did with promising results from the first round if the student had no access to a computer.

After the presentation, however, is when the real fun started. Several people approached me to discuss some of the points I had made. There were those just stunned at the difficulties we face back home and our novel approaches at tackling them. The Dutch who know us so well were even themselves surprised at how difficult our task was! One of the unsurprising interests was our experience with Python which a few others were testing out. There was even some interest in our efforts to get juniors involved.

Once the presentation was done I was far more relaxed, although we still had the contestants hacking away at the problems. I enjoyed the rest of the presentations and there were some great ones given, although there were also those that went bad, mainly by non-native English speakers -- got to give them a hand for trying though. One that especially caught my interest was Ben's paper on alternative training methods. After all the presentations it was announced that the 3rd IOI Conference will be held during the next IOI in Bulgaria. I later caught up with Valentina who runs the conference and she told me they're planning on setting the topic on how countries have progressed over the years.

When we got back to the rooms lunch was not yet ready for us, but I had a couple more discussions about my paper leading me to almost forget entirely about lunch! The contestants seemed to be taking longer to come back this time, but I eventually found our guys just after lunch. The general atmosphere wasn't that great and everyone was keeping to themselves which meant we had to wait for the results to come out. Before they could be released they had already found the computers and started Counter Strike, which proved contagious as several others joined.

When the results finally arrived (they were slow to place them in the pigeon holes again!) I rushed to collect them. Unfortunately the team weren't as anxious to see them as I was, understandable after seeing them. Mark, who had done well on day one did poorly this round while Saadiq was the one to clinch our one hope of success with a full score on linear gardens. All-in-all the problems proved a serious challenge to our team and they weren't expecting such a toughie. Hopefully the two that can return will learn from this experience.

Saadiq ended up with an ear infection and our team leader took him to get medical treatment. Apparently they brought an ambulance sirens blurting yet never even checked his ears! Fortunately his father is a doctor so since returning he's gone for a proper check-up. The Counter Strike returned and continued for many hours. At its peak I counted 12 on the provided computers and many more on laptops. This made getting a computer for Internet usage very difficult.

After a long discussion with some of the guys I'd met earlier in the week, we had our VIP Dinner to go to. It's not often people like us get to go to such an event. The team leaders and deputy leaders were given special invitations the night before and most people dressed in suits, however, with the weather we didn't come prepared for this so I went in the smartest I had, a shirt. I tried dragging Mohamed Taha of the HSC along. He was resistant as he was extremely tired, but I managed to convince him. Unfortunately the buses were packed, but he found a ride with Osama of the ISC. On the road to the dinner I had a discussion with the Macedonian leader who was inspired by my presentation and we exchanged experiences and both gained new ideas from one another.

When we arrived we were greeted by a most wonderful venue full of people dressed in suits, as you can see below. They even laid out the "red" carpet for us. The drinks they served were absolutely stunning, I loved the strawberry and guava! Soon after arriving the main guests arrived. There was the Minister of IT and Communications and the Minister of Education. For the locals it was a great honour to be able to host people of such stature. Just before leaving for the dinner I also heard that many ambassadors were attending the dinner. It turns out all the country's ambassadors had been invited, but unfortunately our's did not show up (it seems roughly half did!).

I wandered around outside a bit with the Macedonian leader before finding Taha and chatting more with him.

Finally when they were ready for us to take our seats we discovered we had been preassigned seats by country. Unfortunately that meant we had to split up and I ended up at a table with Singapore and Serbia. The Serbian ambassador and his wife were also at our table and somehow the two of them ended up sitting between Peter and I, so the Serbian team never really spoke with their ambassador. I had a great time talking with him about his experiences in Cairo, especially as a foreigner who'd lived there for 2.5 years. Strangely he prefers living in Egypt to Serbia, something I wasn't expecting.

The dinner started with several speeches, quite possibly more than any other event. Frankly I've heard enough propaganda from such speeches that I mostly ignored what was being said. The meal that followed was easily the best we had had that week. One good thing about having the ambassador next to me is that he warned me what not to eat, especially the lettuce. During the dinner we had what could end up being quite an historic moment for us in that Nigeria confirmed that they would be hosting the first African Olympiad in Informatics in Max/June 2009. They were that quick in contacting their government and organising the funds!

Once the desert was over we were, as usual, quickly scurried out of the venue. I found it very annoying when they did this, but I suppose it's their culture so it's normal to them. When we got back the guys were still at CS. In fact they ended up pulling right through till breakfast and then skipped the tour the next day in favour of sleep! I had some fun with Ricardo from Spain, Mile from Macedonia and for some time one of the contestants from Azerbaijan (apparently they do absolutely no training for the IOI!). Mile was trying to get us to enter the BOI which they're hosting in October, but it's too far for us and costs too high.

After having enough with the indoors we took a walk outside, something I hadn't done all week so I saw a couple new places. Just before our walk we were asked by one of the guides if we wanted McDonald's. Given that we were in Egypt and that it was one in the morning, we kindly rejected the offer. When we returned from our walk we noticed he had started getting quite the list of orders together. I will never forget him on the phone in the cheesy accent ordering a "Chicken Friday hello hello". Apparently Chicken Friday really is the name of a burger, while "hello" or however you spell it is "nice" in Arabic. Well he ended up taking a lot longer than any of us could have expected. He finally put the order through at three in the morning, which by that time he had convinced us to order a Mc Arabic. Just look at the order he has on his lap:

When he told me the order was going to take two hours to deliver I took it as a cue to go sleep. With such a large order there was bound to be someone who would take my burger, which I had actually planned on sharing with Ricardo anyway. The next morning I found out the order arrived at 04:30 and came to 1,500 Egyptian Pounds ($300)!

The next day was the final GA meeting followed by Dream Park World for the contestants and the Egyptian Museum for the team leaders, ending off with the awards ceremony.

IOI 2008 Solutions

2008-08-20T16:39:00.007+02:00

UPDATE: PDF's of the solutions available here: http://people.ksp.sk/~misof/ioi08/

Here are photos of the official solutions for the IOI tasks of 2008. Anyone care to OCR them? :-P

Printing

Islands

Fish

Linear Garden

Teleporters

Pyramid Base

Results Out

2008-08-20T15:18:00.004+02:00

The second round of competition is over and the results are slowly being revealed. Our results are 156, 111 and two <= 100. SnarkNews is slowly putting together a list of results from those willing to give them their results:

http://snarknews.info/index.cgi?data=newstape&menu=ioi08&head=index&class=ioi08

Another more complete list of results:

http://forums.topcoder.com/?module=Thread&threadID=613160&start=210&mc=220#1015095

IOI Day 4: Pyramids and Task Selection

2008-08-20T13:13:00.006+02:00

This morning there was another GA meeting to discuss any problems with the first day of competition. I asked Taha, one of the leading members of the HSC, and he told me there were no appeals so not much would happen at the meeting. Given this and me being really exhausted I chose an extra hour of sleep in favour of attending the meeting, while our team leader attended just in case anything important arose.

I had some interesting words with Taha last night. He said that there was only a single 100% submission for fish, the hardest task, and that the marks were very low in general. He proposed and set islands, the medium problem, and it was very interesting hearing the procedures he had to go through to get the task and most importantly the test data really polished. It's disappointing that all the organisation around him and the contest itself, i.e. the outings and such, have been plagued by so many problems.

After breakfast this morning (the same...again!) we went to the pyramids of Giza. You hear so much about the history behind the pyramids, possibly more than any other man-made structure that it's amazing to simply think that we were actually going to see them. Last night, as mentioned in my previous post, we saw a glimpse of some pyramids. I had no idea at the time, but these happened to be the ones we were to go up close to today.

When the bus drove past the pyramids we were able for the first time to put into perspective just how amazing a feat it was for man to have built such structures so many years ago. Each block was nearly the height of an average person. It's just amazing getting the opportunity to see them so close I don't think I'll ever get over it.

When we got out the bus for the first time to get an overall view of the three pyramids we were immediately scavenged by locals trying to make a quick buck out of people. They would put one of those material things on your head and get a picture taken of you with them after which they'd ask for money. This happened to me once (pic below), but I never had any money on me so I couldn't pay and he didn't seem to frustrated. After this, however, Robert and Mark got caught out with the local taking the picture with Rob's camera. It looked for a moment that he wasn't going to return the camera until he received money, but then one of our guides came to the rescue!

After taking enough pictures we were called back to the bus which took us right down to the pyramids. Here we had a rather interesting encounter with a local and his camel. This guy approached him with his camel and almost forced him to hop on, while Schalk-Willem continuously said "No money, no money!" and he replied "You student, free for you." After a few words flew back and forth he hopped on the camel. I rushed in front of the camel to get the following picture:

He then insisted that I got on the camel together with Schalk-Willem, which after a bit of hesitation I did. He gave us a nice camel ride and even gave me the whip to speed him up. Then he took our cameras and took what turned out to be very nice photos:

During the ride he asked us if we had US dollars or Euros. I said South African money only, believing I had brought my wallet with me. He got a bit confused and upset, but sounded eventually like he would accept it. Shortly after he let me get off so that Schalk-Willem could ride the camel alone without him holding the lead. When he asked for money I quickly felt in my pocket and realised I had left my wallet in our room (since I had no local money anyway) and he wasn't happy to hear this. During the ride our team leader, Peter, took a couple pictures of us and so he knew we weren't alone. So I went to go ask Peter, but saw our guide and decided to ask him instead.

Our guide had local money and we agreed that 10 Egyptian Pounds ($2) was a fair price. Unfortunately the camel man didn't agree with our definition of fair. He had a lengthy, heated argument with our guide in Arabic which drew quite a crowd. I later found out he wanted 40 pounds for each of us, i.e. 80 pounds ($16) and that our guide said he could do nothing to us and was threatening not to pay a thing. He eventually handed over the money (10 pounds) and we walked away in hysterical laughter anxiously trying to find out what he had said.

After that was all over we went to stand on the edge of one of the pyramids. The blocks were so large that we could only climb up one level. It was an awesome feeling to be able to stand on the pyramids and touch them. Unfortunately we were told not to go inside the pyramids, which we later found out some of the teams had done. I had heard the day before that they only allow a limited number of people in a day, but this was obviously not very accurate.

After nearly reaching the Great Pyramid of Giza (the only standing of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) we were called back to the bus. The last stopover was the Sphinx. I just couldn't believe that we were actually seeing all this for real, it was that amazing. It was right there in front of us. There was a bit of a crowd to get above the Sphinx to get a good view. In this area we were constantly bumping into locals trying to sell things, but we never bought anything.

Once that was all over we headed back to Mubarak City. I was zonked out the whole way back. When we arrived we quickly had lunch which ended with some of the contestants constructing a pyramid of cans. After lunch we had a few hours for activities, but I had my presentation to finish off so I only booked for the paintball at 17:00.

Just before the paintball our team had got hooked onto Counter Strike which also attracted some other contestants. Lets see if this starts a new trend in IOI like we've had in our SACO for a few years now. We were told earlier that the paintball would be 40 on 40, but this was definitely not happening once we saw the field. It ended up being 5 on 5 matches, but they took forever to split us into teams and get things going that by 18:00 they were still busy with the second game. While it looked exciting, us leaders had an important GA meeting to attend to scrutinise the second set of tasks for tomorrow.

The meeting began with some other matters such as the IOI Workshop that took place in May this year and the possibility of a new IOI logo for the return to Bulgaria (hosts of the first IOI) next year. The tasks were then distributed for us to check. The problem set for tomorrow is a really great set, even better than yesterday's. Unfortunately they were once again all batch tasks with no data or interactive problems. This was one of three major objections, the others were that the last problem was similar to a previous task and that the story behind the first one was similar to a previous task. All major objections were rejected while all sixteen minor objections were accepted.

Thankfully food had arrived before we were done with the meeting and so dinner went quickly. We then had a meeting with the leaders from Nigeria and Ghana to discuss introducing an IOI-like competition for the African continent. For now it looks like it will be hosted in Nigeria and about eight countries will be invited. It's nice to see other African countries taking such initiative and we're gladly supporting them. I also discussed the ACM ICPC-like competition I've been planning with them and they're really eager to get more West African universities to enter.

Last night I mentioned to Taha that I would probably be going to the Egyptian museum instead of Dream Park World on Thursday. He put forward the suggestion that we have the option of going to the museum all paid for and such instead of the park and they announced they were doing this at the GA meeting. I was very impressed that he managed to get this changed! Later on though they told us the contestants had to go to the park and only us leaders had the choice, but we're going anyway.

At about 22:00 we were given permission to leave. There was a little mis-communication with those guarding the exit, but we eventually got out. The security was also much tighter as we were walked to our rooms and not allowed to wander inside the building.

So tomorrow is the second and final day of competition. I'm very eager and stressed right now to find out how the guys are going to manage with the problems. The first one is easy, the second needs some thought and the last one is easy to get some marks but I'm still not sure yet how to score full marks, although I have ideas. I am also presenting our paper on "Challenges Running a Computer Olympiad in South Africa" tomorrow morning at 10:30. In the evening us team leaders have a VIP dinner with the H.E. Minister of Communications and IT after some well-earned free time.

IOI Contest Day 1

2008-08-19T01:34:00.000+02:00

Today was the start of the real competition at the IOI with the first of two five hour rounds with three problems each. From the GA meeting last night us team leaders saw the problems and recognised the last two as challenging, however, we still underestimated them as the scores have turned out lower than usual.

While the contestants wrote the competition the team leaders attended the 2nd IOI Conference, where some interesting papers were presented. Unfortunately I've been so zonked out that I had to skip the second half in favour of sleep.

As usual it was very stressful waiting for the contestants not knowing how they were coping. At least with the ACM ICPC we get to view the scores during the contest, whereas here we get absolutely no feedback. This was made worse when the spew of contestants came back from the contest arena into lunch and they kept on coming, and coming and we never saw our team...Peter eventually decided to look around for them and found them. The first signs weren't very good, but after hearing what the other teams had to say we felt a bit better.

One thing in past IOI's that has varied drastically is the time for results to be released. This year it was looking reasonable as they quickly got the results printed, but then they took their sweet time to release them and put them in the pigeon holes. They insisted that we could not collect them until they had placed everyone's results in the pigeon holes, which was a painful process to watch. Just before they eventually finished I was told they had enabled analysis mode so many teams saw their results on the contest computers. We stuck it out a couple more minutes and I was one of the first to collect the paper results.

The results were almost as expected from what the guys had thought of their submissions, minus a couple silly bugs. Our top score was 100, which given the partial unofficial results doesn't look so bad compared to what it might have in a previous IOI. A good score seems to be 140 -- 100 for printing and 40 for islands, although 100 is good enough to make a return in the next round of competition.

After the results were released we went back to the contest arena for analysis mode. We tried saving our solutions and the official test data to flash disk, but the judges for some reason didn't like that idea and were insistant that we stop immediately. I hope we weren't the only ones stopped as we weren't even allowed to print solutions. Anyway, we looked through the results and discovered a couple silly bugs such as the use of ints instead of long long in a single place for islands.

Once we were satisfied with things we went to catch the bus for the Nile cruise, which was supposed to leave it 17:00. Want to guess what happened? Why yes of course, we sat in the bus for about 2 hours before leaving with absolutely no reason given at all! When we finally did get going we were stuck in pretty heavy traffic, which is unusual for us at this time of day. It was about a 90 minute bus ride to the ship and we caught our first glimpse of pyramids along the way. I was so surprised to see them as I wasn't expecting them that when I did see them I shouted "Woah, pyramids!!" and my entire team abrubtly woke up!

And I just have to include this wonderful photo:

After waiting so patiently in the bus and taking the long bus ride, our patience was to be tested even further as we waited about another 45 minutes for the ship to arrive and be prepared for us. When we eventually got on we were offered a buffet dinner and we ran to be one of the first in the queue. It was pretty good food and a nice filler given the previously smallish meals we've been served. The dessert was especially delicious!

The dinner was accompanied by some humorous dancing:

The bus trip back included lots of sleeping:

Tomorrow we have a trip to the pyramids of Giza in the morning followed by activities and the GA meeting for the second day of tasks.

IOI Day 2: Opening Ceremony, Practice Session and Task Selection

2008-08-17T23:55:00.001+02:00

Dear oh dear, the Egyptians really take African time way too seriously. The organisation to get into the venue for the opening ceremony this morning wasn't the greatest, but they definitely made up for it with the performances. The speeches were cut to a minimum, although we've been told they're holding them back for the closing ceremony where we'll have the president's son and expected future president give a speech amongst other top people in Egypt.

The speeches were followed by some Egyptian dancing, which was quite fascinating to watch especially with the dresses. We then had the world's most famous marimba player give a solo, which was pretty damn awesome! The crowd really cheered her on very nicely and it made the opening ceremony a memorable one.

Due to the delays they had to shift the practice session after lunch, which was made an hour early. Lunch was once again the big meal of the day (something I have yet to get used to). After lunch we hung around a bit more waiting to head over to the contest room for the practice contest.

The practice contest is always an interesting time as its the first time we get to see the contest environment. The handin and evaluation system has gone back to being a new system specifically developed for this event, something which I had hoped had died given the recent years. As expected with any new system there were problems and one major one was the networking issues they had. I'm not sure if related to the networking problems, but our team would get different feedback for different submissions of the same code! This was highly frustrating given that you couldn't trust the errors it spewed at you. There were a few other problems which I hope they'll sort out before the competition tomorrow.

I'm not sure where they bought them from, but look at what they're still using these:

The contest arena was separated into 13 rooms with about 8 teams per room, which is different to what I'm used to seeing in the past. We had the Spanish and Swedish team next to us and I had some interesting discussions with their leaders (two of whom I had previously met). The Swedish guys are hosting the ACM ICPC World Finals next year and I've been talking to them a bit about that. They claim that they're going to be putting on a real whopper of a World Finals, already have booked out three of their grande hotels! They're preparing to host the first World Finals with live commentary for spectators, streaming it over the Internet. Because of this they are also pushing to get automated judging, something which the judges are constantly resisting. Lets hope they can successfully outdo Shanghai, which would be really impressive.

After the practice session we had to rush over to our first GA meeting, leaving the contestants behind. The GA meetings can be rather amusing as they're highly democratic with voting on every minor point. They go as far as voting on the agenda of the meetings. This year started off no different to last year, with a couple issues raised. One was that the version of FPC used was unstable and the request was that they change the compiler flags from -O2 to -O1. However, as you can imagine this would cause countless problems in the uncertainty as they had tested the solutions using the exisitng -O2 flag.

After seeing the contestants for one last time we went to the second GA meeting where we were given the tasks for the first day of competition. Our job was to scrutinise the tasks and then translate them into our national languages. This is always a fun time as we get to discuss in detail with other team leaders the solutions to the tasks.

[This post was only published well into the start of the competition. The timestamp is the time of writing, not publishing.]

The first problem is really easy with only a small trick you have to notice, so I hope most of our team doesn't overlook this small trick and solves it successfully. The second problem is a tricky graph problem with lots of smaller parts that need to all work in linear time, which I haven't quite worked at a full solution to as I'm way too sleepy right now. The third problem is a really interesting task that stumped even the original author who submitted the problem with a quadratic solution in mind, but the scientific committee discovered an NlogN solution of which all I've heard is really icky. I'm sure I'll hear the solution soonish though. All-in-all a very nice problem set in my opinion.

So back to the task scrutinising. We had a couple minor issues with the task descriptions, but as we never considered them problematic enough for our team we never reported them. There was a total of ten minor and one major objection. The major objection was from the Croatian team that they had a similar problem to Islands in their national contest last year. The scientific committee said they were aware of this task and considered it significantly different enough to keep the task and everyone took their word for it without further question. Besides one minor objection, which I cannot remember, the others were all accepted. Then their was one guy who blurted out something minor about the Islands task that he wanted to be considered a major issue. Fortunately the voting process stepped in quickly which democratically calmed him down.

Once the tasks were accepted we moved onto translation. One advantage of coming from an English speaking country, however, is that we get to mingle with the other English speaking countries instead! It took a good while for them to bring in dinner and it arrived cold, as we have become so used to. I could have easily downed two of those meals, but many people had to wait for the second and even third batch to arrive so I never did.

Peter and I ended up spending most of the time, and yes it was a long time, chatting with the Brits and Troy. We kept wandering just when they'd let us leave, a major point of discussion in all years as we have to wait for the contestants to return from their activities and get back to their rooms so as not to meet with the leaders who have seen the tasks. We also have to wait for the tasks to be finalised, which thankfully has hasn't been a bottleneck so far this year.

After we got sick of debating on the Egyptian definition of "soon" I went to go have a talk with the Ghana and Nigerian leaders. We discussed some of the issues that they've been having in running their national contest to select their teams for the IOI. They sound very enthusiastic about getting involved and are even set on entering some teams into our ACM ICPC regional contest for Southern Africa with the eventual aim to break away and form their own West African regional. They're very eager and think they can get at least 6 countries from West Africa to participate and they definitely have a strong backing from the government. I talked to the about the African contest for university students I've been running and they were very excited to hear more about it.

Eventually at about 23:30 we were told we could leave, which was half an hour sooner than our original estimates so one point to the organisers! We all ran straight for our rooms after getting the word so the day was over.

Tomorrow is the first day of competition from 09:00-14:00 with an online contest scheduled to start at 17:00 (14:00 GMT) while us leaders attend day one of the IOI Conference. This is followed by a trip down the Nile river.

Waiting...

2008-08-17T08:41:00.003+02:00

So the Egyptians like to keep us waiting by changing schedule several times. First they switched the opening ceremony and practice session around, then switched them back to their original slots and now they've delayed the opening ceremony by an hour. I suppose they have some important speaker that's got a very busy schedule or something. Oh, and the buses may leave after the ceremony starts, woopie!

More time to meet people though! Got to meet Ilham from Indonesia, a frequent reader and commenter on this blog, and someone who I cannot remember his name from Emirates.

Arrival in Cairo, Egypt

2008-08-16T23:29:00.002+02:00

After about 10 hours of flying we arrived at Cairo airport at about 06:30 this morning. We were greeted by a couple of very helpful IOI organisers who helped us through customs and such and took us all the way to our bus.

We then had about an hour bus ride to the Mubarak City of Education where we'll be staying for the next week. The ride was slightly crazy, with drivers straddling often lanes between two other cars in the actual lanes. Not nearly as bad as my recent trip to China though. We passed north of Cairo (the place we're staying is about 20km outside of Cairo) and got to see some of the less upmarket apartment blocks. What was very strange was the number of satellite dishes they had, all of them looking as though they haven't worked for the past 20 years. Click the images below to see what I mean.

When we arrived at Mubarak City we were welcomed by our guide Mustafa, who has been very friendly and helpful as have many of the other guides. He quickly took us to register which was so fast I was dead sure we had to return later, but that was not to be. He then took us to our rooms. The one thing with the IOI is that you almost always stay in student dorms and this year's no different. The four contestants are staying together in a single room while I share a room with four beds with our team leader Peter Waker. There is a single bathroom shared between two rooms and we share ours with the Spanish team leaders.

After sleeping for a few hours we went down for lunch at 14:00. Here we met up with the Fieke Dekker, the British deputy leader, and Don Piele, the US team leader. The locals consider lunch the big meal of the day so we had some nice sausage, chicken and rice with soup as a starter and some really nice apple pie for dessert.

After lunch we went to pay the registration fees, which once again was painless and quick. We then wandered around and met some more people. I bumped into Mohamed Taha, member of the host scientific committee which I'm friends with from the ACM ICPC. I had a lengthy chat with Troy from Canada, Fieke and her husband Richard with Kim from the Netherlands and Rob Kolstad from the US bumping in a bit.

We then went to the IMAX to watch some Dinosaurs: Back to the Crutaceous or some other documentary in 3D. The 3D part was awesome as always, but the story line and acting was shocking. We also met up with the contestants at the IMAX (we split up after arriving) and went to the Internet lounge together where we met yet more people. There was also this random-looking Arab guy with this huge pot around his shoulders handing out this very strong berry-tasting juice.

After hanging around we went for supper at 20:00, where we met up with the Dutch delegation which we are very friendly with. Supper was, as we were warned, basically bread with a couple small pieces of chicken.

After dinner they had a party with some loud music. Not usually my scene, but the chance to meet new people is always well worth it. I met the Swedish delegation, who are hosting next years ACM ICPC World Finals. Along with other very interesting things I heard, they told me they've booked out the top three hotels in Sweeden for the event! We also met the Serbian delegation, one of the few with a female contestant and the team from Ghana, participating for their first time.

New Zealanders and Aussies, interesting bunch that lot. Well we've met some of the contestants from both sides earlier on and now again some more. Well lets just say they were the ones who got the whole party really booming. Here's the main culprit (blonde dude):

And this is how they partied:

It's an early morning tomorrow with the opening ceremony starting at 09:00 and the practice contest at 11:00. This is then followed by the first lot of GA meetings which are always most entertaining with their extreme level of democracy, while the contestants enjoy themselves at some Golf park.

Final IOI Preparations

2008-08-10T22:58:00.000+02:00

The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is the pinnacle of programming competitions for high school students. Getting the opportunity to lead your countries team is a great honour, one which I get for a second time at IOI 2008 starting in a weeks time. This year it's in Egypt, making it the second IOI on the African continent. Need I even say how excited I am to finally get the opportunity to visit this amazing country holding some of the world's most famous monuments, including the magnificent pyramids.

The South African team for this year was announced in May this year, but one of the members withdrew due to personal issues, otherwise we would have two brothers (a first for IOI?). The team I will be taking to Egypt, along with Peter Waker:

Mark Danoher: 1st in SACO 2007 and participated in IOI 2007
Schalk-Willem Krüger: Shown great success and is young enough to compete until IOI 2010
Saadiq Moolla: Narrowly missed the team in 2007 and participated in IMO 2006/7
Robert Ketteringham: Reserve called up last minute and is eligible to compete in IOI 2009

I will be presenting a paper at the second IOI Conference held in conjunction with the IOI. It is titled "Challenges Running a Computer Olympiad in South Africa", which outline the format of the various rounds of the SACO and identifies the challenges we face and how we have tackled them.

The team gathers together for one final training camp starting Tuesday. We depart on Egypt Air on Friday, arriving early Saturday morning. We hope to have a prosperous IOI, and I at least really look forward to enjoying what our fellow Africans have prepared for us (schedule here). I also look forward to once again meeting some of the top international talent, which is always worth the trip on its own. Keep your eyes on this blog for our experience in the ancient land.

Chinglish

2008-08-08T21:29:00.000+02:00

Funny Chinese signs with broken English are all over the Internet. It's one thing seeing them on the Internet, but seeing them for yourself you realise how truly bad the situation really is. It's so difficult to believe that people can screw up so royally this often, but it couldn't be more true. I've put together a collection of some of the wacky signs and such that we saw in 9 days in China, without us actively searching for any! Hopefully this put things into perspective for some people.

Anyone want to try travel the hurl?

This was on the door of public toilets

Um...right!

Chinese Red Bull (check the bottom!)

Conjuring with grapes...um yes

What makes chips Natural & Warm?

A simple misspelling gone wrong! There's food behind there. ;)

Found outside the Oriental Pearl TV Tower; some of these are hilarious (click image to read)

What can I say...

Would love to know what they meant to say!

Not so much poor English, but funny nonetheless

Thank-you sooo much :)

And then there were some bad ones even at the RoboCup arena. The fact that this is an international event amazes me that these were there.

Looks innocent enough, right?

Look closer at the spelling of RoboC*u*p. That's the spelling used on the official t-shirts, but the certificates were worse -- Robocuop!

The Chinese seem to love their Happy Party

Um, yes...this is referring to RoboCup as was the one above.

Since when is RoboCup a pageant?!

Besides the funny description of RoboCup, notice the spelling :)

Cuil Fails to Impress

2008-08-03T16:35:00.000+02:00

There's been a lot of buzz around Cuil, a new search engine produced by ex-Googlers. In my opinion it is mostly due to this very fact that they are ex-Googlers that there is such a buzz around it and if this is the case it is sure to be short-lived if they don't up their game fast.

I just recently got myself a new phone and I've been searching for what cool things you can do with Bluetooth on Ubuntu. I had been previously searching for this on Google and what would you know, the first two hits are very useful. Lets try the same search on Cuil. What are the results like? Well it seemed to only care about the "ubuntu" keyword and almost completely disregard the "bluetooth" keyword. I couldn't care less about Ubuntu 5.10 release notes!

Not a good first start. I'm sure many people have tried searching for themselves on Google just out of curiosity. I do so fairly regularly as it's one way I can track how Google changes results over time. Do the search on Google and you get my blog and website right on top, spot on! Do the same and Cuil and...oh no! Tiramisu recipe?! Ok so there's an Italian cook with that shares my name. What's the flight simulator screenshot doing next to a result on recipes?! Then there's the five results that look identical from looking at the results page, their snippets need some urgent attention. It seems they just increased the snippet length to get around that downfall of theirs, but nope it won't work for long. Two of these reults are in fact exact duplicates, so their duplicate detection needs working on if they have any at all. There's no point boasting about having the largest index without it being a useful one. I'd rather have 10 solid results than a million shitty ones with those 10 hidden amongst the mess.

Lets dig through a few more pages of results to dig deeper. Nothing interesting on the 2nd page but my Digg profile, how exciting. 3rd page, nothing. Dear these thumbnails next to the results are random, what's up with the guy weighing himself? 4th page, my Digg profile again (just with the www. in front this time!). And oh wow, finally my website...on the 4th page of results!! I tried looking for my blog but I gave after page 10.

In response to Tim Keller's more positive comments:

Black background on the homepage: Might be nice, but not going to convert me
Auto suggest: You get the same thing with the Firefox search bar or Google Suggest, which return ranked suggestions.
Magazine style presentation: Nice at first glance, but is it productive?
Simplicity:Personal taste, but the value far outweighs the clutter of the "Sign in" options and such. Google run exhaustive tests before changing their interface.
Explore by category: Nice idea, already tested by Google while I was there, but from my experience the categories weren't often relevent.

In short, a few nice new touches to the interface isn't going to outwiegh quality results. While it may be promising, Cuil really needs lots of work before it gets anywhere in the highly competitive search engine market. And please stop the boasting in the about pages, not even when you do make it up there!

Tour of Suzhou, China

2008-07-29T15:40:00.000+02:00

Sunday:

Sunday was our only full day off, so we went on a guided bus tour of Suzhou. Considering the experience it was a R300 well spent. We saw many of the sights that has made Suzhou famous.

We started out at the Lingering Garden which has been around for over 400 years. We had a really good English-speaking guide who explained a lot about the meaning behind the various symbols. For example, in one room there was a square marble slab next to a circular marble slab. The square resembled the Earth as it was still considered flat in those days and the circle resembled the sky. Together the represented harmony. Unfortunately there was just too much information to remember it all, so I'll leave you with the pictures (many more here):

Our team: Marco, Andre, Asief, Eugene, Graeme and Stephen

That bottle of coke cost about R3 :-P

Plenty bonsai trees

We then visited this fresh water pearl factory shop, which sold pearls for almost nothing. This stopover wasn't actually part of the usual tour and was a treat offered by our guide as he really enjoyed our group. Unfortunately I don't know enough about jewellery to go buying on my own so I didn't get any as cheap as it was. This is where I started meeting a couple teams for the first time. Here's a snapshot of the mayhem at the shop (it was bad enough before we arrived!):

We then had some lunch, which wasn't so great. The Chinese really try to hard to serve us Western food, but they just don't know how to do it properly so they should stick to what they do best! It was buffet, but check out these evil Chinese tactics:

Suzhou is famous for many things, mostly for it's gardens which we had already seen one of. Another thing it's famous for is producing the best silk in China. The next place on our agenda was the No. 1 Silk Factory. There we got to hear the life of a silk from the birth of the silk worm to finding the thread of the cocoons to making the final product. It was a very interesting experience watching the hard labour involved and how the workers worked together with the machines to produce the silk thread from the cocoons.

At the end we had some time to look around in their silk shops. They had such an abundance of silk products for sale, all so cheap, that it was very difficult to decide on what to buy. In the end I only bought a queen-size silk duvet for about R700, which comparing to the price of a feather duvet in South Africa is damn cheap!

Baby silk worms chowing on mulberry leaves

Threading eight silk strands together

Finding the thread of the cocoons

Reading design on punch cards to knit silk fabric

Workers producing a silk duvet

Our next stopover was the Humble Administrator's Garden. It is the largest of the gardens in Suzhou and is one of the four most famous gardens in China. As much as I loved the gardens, we spent so much time in the first one that by the time we got to this one I, along with many others, were getting a bit tired of seeing what was for us mostly the same thing. I would have definitely have enjoyed them more had I seen them on separate days as the heat was also getting to us by now.

Below is the inside of the entrance to the garden. This door is made of steel on one inside for strength and wood on the outside for beauty. The level of detail in the carvings is mind boggling. The inset towards the center of this image is a fully detailed sculpture.

Inside the garden, with four viewing areas. Each viewing area was designed for a different season, for example the spring viewing area was located to take advantage of viewing the blooming of the flowers. There is another viewing area where he would go to drink his tea and see the four moons:

The moon in the sky
The reflection in the water in front of him
The reflection in the mirror behind him
The reflection in his cup of tea

The Grand Canal of China is the longest canal in the world, stretching all the way from Shanghai to Beijing for a total distance of roughly 1,770 km. The canal dates back to the 5th century BC, so it was an amazing opportunity to get to take a boat ride down a part of it as the final part of this tour of Suzhou. It lasted about 45 minutes (no we did not cross the entire length of the canal!) and the rocking of the wakes made us very sleepy after the long tour. We got to see some very nice sights, including some ancient temples.

The boats we rode in. We had to take two as the group was too big.

View from the boat as we crossed the canal

By the end of the tour we were completely knackered. It started out at 11:00 and we got back past 17:30. It was really well worth it though as we got to see everything Suzhou was famous for: the gardens, the silk, the canals and the fresh pearls.

There was just one thing left for us to do at the end of the day and that was team registration. Unfortunately we had just missed the last bus provided by the RoboCup organisers so we had to pay a whopping R2 to catch a public bus. Thankfully one of the volunteers came to help us decipher the bus schedule and get us onto the correct bus or we would have stood no chance. The registration process was fairly painless, besides us having to sign our lives away 17 times. This was the first opportunity we got to meet our German team members from RWTH-Aachen.

Cape Town to Suzhou

2008-07-29T13:48:00.000+02:00

Now that I'm back in chilly Cape Town my plan is to blog about the experience I had in more detail. Things were just too intense up in China that I didn't get enough time to jot everything down. But that's a good thing. :)

Friday:

We had an early morning flight leaving Cape Town for Johannesburg on BA. They're starting to build like mad at Cape Town's airport, so our gate was a temporary marquee which was something new to me. It was a short 2 hour flight, followed by 3 hours in OR Thambo International Airport. The building at Cape Town's airport in minuscule in comparison as they've been building for the past 2-3 years here. Luckily we weren't affected much by it, but as much as I travel this place looks new to me every time I pass through!

Team minus me at OR Thambo

The remainder of our flights were all with Emirates, which I had previously heard only good stories about. I've flown many airlines before so I was all too eager to test them out. We already had a good experience with them giving us excellent accommodation rates in Dubai, but they also tried screwing us over after cancelling our Dubai to Shanghai flight by trying to give us a 21 hour stopover in Dubai, which we blatantly refused in favour of passing through Johannesburg.

During check-in for our flight to Dubai I could immediately tell who from our group were infrequent travellers. Some were all too eager to go to customs to register their laptops and such, something which I have only ever done once before. As you will discover towards the end of this post it was pretty useless even under extreme conditions. Finding a place to eat was also an interesting endeavour as no-one could make a decision as to where to eat. We finally ended up going through passport control to the gates and ate there, where the food was limited to a single cafe and hence expensive. I stocked up on some snacks which later proved useful.

When we finally got around to boarding the next flight I was amazed at the size of the engines on the new Boeing 777-300. Being a new plane it was nice and clean inside, but best of all was the on-board entertainment system. It was by far the best I have ever experienced with over 500 channels to choose from, and best of all was it was turned on before we boarded the plane, while other airlines usually only boot the systems up after take-off. The 7 hour flight was extremely comfortable and by flight standards the food was decent.

Saturday:

We landed in Dubai just after midnight on Saturday morning. Compared to the weather we left behind in Cape Town, the heat here was intense even for daytime weather (and this was at midnight!). It was a taste of what was to come for us when we were to return here 10 days later. The airport here was one like I have never experienced before. It was so packed with people, many of them sleeping, that it looked like a refugee camp. Remember that this was now 1 in the morning. We had a quick bite to eat before boarding our next flight. I had chicken wings which had some crazy spices I had never tasted before.

Our next flight to Shanghai lasted about 8 hours and wasn't as comfortable as the previous one. The seats were designed for use with leg rests, but they had to since remove them as it was discovered they would amputate both feet in a crash. With the feet of any reasonably sized person dangling above the floor, our feet were completely swollen by the end of the flight. At least the entertainment system was the same as on the previous flight, even though I slept through most of the flight.

After the trainee customs officer took a while to inspect my passport we finally went through to collect our luggage and met up with the RoboCup volunteers who organised a bus to Suzhou for us.

Continue reading Arrival in Suzhou, China.

Leaving China

2008-07-21T05:01:00.000+02:00

We leave China this evening and spend four nights in Dubai before heading back home. This trip has been one hell of an experience and truly bolsters my feeling of China being the most amazing country I have visited. I was in Shanghai in 2005 for the ACM ICPC and I had an awesome time. This really is one of the few places I'd love to return to.

We ended up having only two matches, both on Sunday. Like everyone else, we had many serious issues with the robots. They were breaking, overheating, camera channels randomly swapping. The API provided (NaoQi) by Aldebaran was chowing CPU and RAM and what made matters worse was that when CPU usage hit 100% the robot went through an emergency shutdown and collapsed. We drew both matches 0-0, but the teams we played were ahead of us in their gameplay as bad as we all were so we got knocked out.

We went out to Shanghai on Saturday so we missed the quarter- and semi-finals. More on what happened there later, it was an awesome experience. The finals were held yesterday and honestly it could have been made a little more exciting. I was expecting huge crowds, but the problem was there was simply insufficient space for them as the fields were too close to on another. The Aibo final was first and the Northern Bites from Bowdoin clinched what may have been the final Aibo league.

Then CMU with Georgia Tech played against the NUManoids team from Newcastle in Australia. There were some rather humerous points in the game, but neither team did anything special so they went to penatlies, but not penalties in the normal sense. There was no goalie -- a single robot was placed in front of the goal with the ball in front of it and it had to score as quickly as possible. CMU/Georgia went first and completely screwed up unfortunately, but eventually got the ball in the goals about 3 minutes later. Newcastle, on the other hand, walked up to the ball and kicked for goal in seconds and clinched the first Nao league. The president of RoboCup who is from CMU had some amusing moments.

We've all had an amazing time here. Not only is the location awesome, the venue awesome, but so are all the people. I never knew one could get so many Germans in one place outside of Europe. They were great fun and I really look forward to meeting most of them again in the German Open in Hamburg, April next year.