I didn’t do teamscode since it clashes with this
which turned out to be a decision I would (probably) never regret
BrUMO is a math competition hosted by Brown University the first time this year. It has an individual round, a team round, and a guts round, all of which are 80 minutes long.
I didn’t really expect too much after my trash performance in CMIMC, but later I realized that each individual test was worth 1/18 of the total score which meant that even if I threw it surely wouldn’t have that large of an impact on our team (Lexington Beta) aggregates.
But it could exactly be due to the low expectations and pressure that led to my unexpectedly good performance.
In the opening ceremony there was an estimation form which I forgot to submit, but surely it didn’t matter since none of the answers I wanted to guess were any close to the actual value.
Then there was the individual round. I was extremely slow in the beginning and only solved like 5 problems in the first 25 minutes. But then I started cooking because of combo and did the middle problems pretty quickly. I also got p12, p14, guessed 4560 for p15 (because I forgot to add one but then my answer would have been 4561 which is still wrong), and assumed a triangle was isosoles in p11. But I didn’t even want to read the statement of p13 because it’s too long (although I wouldn’ve have solved it anyway because it’s geometry). I spent the last ~15 minutes checking my work and caught 2 sillies (p1 multiplied by an extra 2 and p5 multiplied wrong).
Anyway I expected a 12 since I didn’t think p15 would be that easy nor that I would guess p11 right. But turned out that I read p6 wrong but also guessed p11 right which was mad lucky. This made my score distribution 11111 01111 11010
After knowing how other people did I believed I was around 3rd in Lexington and I would probably place although I didn’t know where exactly (personally I expected around 6th). But then I was too excited and kept sillying on team round (but since it’s a team round most of the sillies were caught so we still got a 12). After that was lunch which BrUMO didn’t provide, but we went to shake shack and ended up waiting for 40 minutes with < 20 minutes to eat. Fortunately though the guts round was later delayed so it wasn’t that bad.
I actually contributed something in guts round which was nice. I did p23 with the geometry interpretation which was pretty clean, and also did some of the earlier combo problems (which would’ve been solved by my orz teammates anyway).
Then, we went to the puzzlehunt which was quite interesting, I did it with 3 other male freshmen from Lexington. Although we needed several hints to solve each puzzle, it was still a pretty fun experience since I haven’t done many (in person) puzzlehunts before.
After that was a Po-Shen Loh talk about euler’s number and the awards ceremony. During the awards ceremony, we were pretty sure who we didn’t win against (Lexington Alpha in every round and Math School 1 in Guts), so when they were announcing the nth place and we were sure that (n - 1) teams were above us, we stood up and walked towards the stage early which was funny.
For the Individual awards, as they announced each place starting from 10th, I felt increasingly excited while at the same time slightly worried that I might’ve written the wrong answers on the answer sheets. I ended up getting 3rd place, which was the best possible result I imagined, and turned out to be more than 7 points away from the 2nd place. This meant that even if I didn’t silly problem 6, I would still have been 3rd place, so I didn’t feel that bad about that anymore.
Then there was pictures and we got to choose a book which I didn’t really know what to pick, so I ended up taking Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World which I haven’t started reading as of now (4/8).
This all felt so unreal though … If I had sillied one more problem … If I hadn’t double checked … If I hadn’t guessed p11 right … If I had guessed p13 correctly like a certain admitter …
BrUMO was a pretty good experience overall. The problems were nice (maybe I have bias because I did good), and it was organized pretty well as the first time this competition was held.
Update (4/11): We were originally 3rd place guts and 2nd place in team and sweepstakes, but due to a problem being voided and issues with the guts freezing, we became 3rd in sweepstakes and 4th in guts. Now that I think of it standing up early was so clown since we didn’t even get that placement. At least we get to keep the trophies, that’s all that matters…
Hopefully I make USACO Camp! I think decisions usually come out towards the end of April so we’ll see. I’m also doing M{IT}^2 round 2 spring invitational tomorrow as well as SMT Online on Sunday, will probably write recaps for those as well.
Wow I didn’t expect this to be so wordy.