AMC 10B, MMATHS, PUMaC, and BMT Online (MITIT deserves a separate post)
AMC 10B
It’s been a while so I forgot what happened, but I ended up getting a 130.5 which is not good but also better than 114 and only 1 AIME problem away from 150 under the new scoring system so I’ll take this.
MMATHS
Discuss about the problems is not allowed apparenntly but they didn’t tell us so I’ll pretend that I didn’t know.
Individual Round
I got p1-10 and couldn’t do p11 (which was NT) because I misread it, then spent around 20 minutes on checking my work because I thought 10 definitely places… then I wasn’t called for tiebreakers. But as it turned out, I actually got 14th (which isn’t really placing but close enough), and 6 of the people who placed above me got p1-9 + 11. I feel this tiebreaking thing isn’t fair because more people solved p11 than p10 so they should be below me but whatever I was lucky enough to even get top 16 (on Yale site).
Team Round
I started with doing the earlier combinatorics problems, then decided after around 10 minutes to engineer induct p12 with vyx. Originally I realized that his construction was wrong but after 20 minutes we ended up finding an optimal construction which yielded the same answer so we just wasted a lot of time. I didn’t really contribute a lot in this team round because I ended up sillying most of the problems I did (thankfully my teammates checked). Meanwhile, vrondoS carried and did 8 problems in team and carried us to 3rd place!
Guts Round
I kind of forgot but we were the only team to get the first 5 sets right, then I started zromitting and got like all the combo I did wrong. We didn’t realize that there was the true or false set so we got 0 points on that one which was a huge disadvantage, but thanks to mintyl (who got 2/3 problems in the cyclic round, don’t ask me how) we still ended up being top 10.
We also saw texington place second place guts and overall which was orz (Lexington gave us the options to make our own teams this time so there’s Lexington Alpha-Gamma, texington, and Lexington Zeta).
PUMaC
It’s explicitly mentioned that discuss wasn’t allowed but distributions were out so I guess I can discuss about those?
I was in Lexington Beta.
On Friday I sat with MathFun1000 on the bus. We played like everything in 2 player games on my ipad and decided to lock in and actually do math. I got like 11101010 on 2021 combinatorics and 11100100 on 2023 number theory. I went to shake shack for lunch and a pho place for dinner. After that, me and my roomates played card games such as Cambio and bs.
Then was the actual tests.
Number Theory
Won’t actually discuss about the problems but I got a 0 or something close to that. I misread p1, misread + sillied p2, sillied p3, and probably didn’t get p4 right either (these were the only problems I did 💀 I’m just bad at NT).
Combinatorics
Did a little bit better. After comparing answers, I thought my distribution was 01110100 which I believed had a high chance of placing (arithmetic error on p1 and misread p5 😭 I should spend more time reading & annotating problems carefully). However, my p6 was actually wrong, making my distribution 01110000 which did not place. Well at least it was better than NT I guess, and I was in top 30.
Team
Did p5 for almost the entire duration of the contest, although I also checked p10 and p12 which Awesomeness_in_a_bun did orz (and I think both ended up being correct).
Puzzle Hunt
Our team name was “Charles and Friends” (there were two Charleses). We were cooking until I said Quebec is a city which resulted in us getting 0 points on a bonus problem oops. I think if that problem had been removed we would’ve been first (we ended up being 4th). It was still very fun though.
For dinner, we ate at The Nassau Diner (there was 10 people so they had to combine tables). After that, some of us went to buy boba while the rest of us waited outside. While waiting, Alternet happened to pass by and we said hi (so MITIT won’t be the first day I meet my teammate in real life lol). On our way back, I surprisingly managed to sleep for almost the entire time while the people at the back were doing karaoke.
Awards
Lexington had two people from both Alpha and Beta place 9th place in geometry (orz). Lexington Alpha got 1st in team round and surprisingly, we ended up being 7th in team (tying Lehigh Valley Fire)!!! Unfortunately Alpha didn’t place overall because of certain issues in their power submission 😭
BMT Online
This is not a part of November but I’m still not good at NT.
Discrete
I did p1-5 pretty quickly, then did p6 with recursion after about 5 minutes. Then I realized that p7 was basically BrUMO 2025 Individual p12 so I didn’t need to think about it. After that I spent around 15 minutes to do p8, for which I had the right idea but added instead of subtracting somewhere which yielded a result of over 30000 instead of 13328. I then did p9 which I thought was trivially 52 by the construction
1 | 11 10 10 9 9 9 8 8 8 8 7 7 |
Thankfully when I was checking I realized that this was impossible but it works if two of the 8s are changed to 7s, which is obviously the maximum given that 52 was impossible (I also caught another silly). My distribution ended up being 11111 11010, where both p8 and p10 were NT.
Algebra
Did kind of bad, but since I’m pretty bad at algebra this was expected anyway (C >>>> N > A >>> G). I did p1-7 but my answer to p7 was very ugly so I didn’t expect it to be right. I ended up sillying p4 because I can’t add so distribution was 11101 10000.
Discrete Tiebreakers
So 8 problems that’s not first 8 ended up making tiebreakers. I didn’t think I would make top 10 though because 18 people made tb for discrete and I’m not fast at all (never had MATHCOUNTS practice / experience). But the tiebreaker round was pretty light; I got both p1 and p3 in 1 minute but only ended up getting the correct answer for p2 after 7 minutes because I kept misreading the problem. I thought this tiebreaking score was very bad because I felt that on a better day I definitely could’ve done all in less than 2 minutes.
But I ended up being the 2nd place among everyone who got an 8 (which got me 8th place)! Although it wasn’t perfect I was happy about it because a lot of people who are much better at math than me didn’t end up placing.
Guts
We threw this one oops. We got 1/3 in set 2 even despite having 2 people do each problem which was a bit discouraging. We didn’t end up getting a good score but it was still fun I guess (at least we weren’t too far from Alpha considering that we basically skipped set 2).
Other Stuff
I’m not cooking at school so my GPA is still a bit cooked. Oh also LMT is this Saturday so if you happen to be a middle schooler near MA (which is very unlikely), go sign up! I wrote a little bit more problems this time.