MITIT was the only in-person competitive programming contest I went to in 9th grade (outside of camp contests). Last year, I teamed with two other people from Lexington and we got first place in-person HS beginner (we were CodeTiger ORZ ORZ ORZ).

This time, there was actually much more prize money for the advanced division, and also an individual round which seemed cool. I wanted to do the individual round, and at the time they didn’t say you could take both the beginner team round and advacned individual round, so I was planning to solo. But then soon later I found out that alter is coming so I teamed with him along with mrmoooo (another camper).

Saturday

On Saturday, I got there late because of BMT online tiebreakers. I carpooled with vyx so I was watching the awards ceremony on the car while he was playing tetr for the saturday night event. He got second, which is orz considering that the car was pretty shaky.

When we got there we met Bhavy and CodingPokemon, and we played cambio. During lunch I also met CodeTiger and mrmoooo. CodeTiger asked why I wasn’t in the club leader discussion block oops. Then for the second block we went to play poker (CodingPokemon left), and then a bunch of people we didn’t know joined which was kind of fun but not really at the same time because I’m not that good at socializing.

While leaving, we (me and vyx) met alter and we took a selfie (the quality was a bit questionable).

Sunday

Arrived a bit late, I forgot why, but I think they also delayed opening ceremony a bit. Sat with the Lexington squad for opening ceremony, then I left for indiv round.

Indiv

This round was 2 hours long

Solved A after 33 minutes after quite a few incorrect greedy attempts. I was like 10th onsite HS so I sort of panicked. Then I read B and didn’t have any idea after thinking for 20 more minutes and realized that there’s only 1 hour left.

So I read C which had 70 points worth of subtasks. I quickly knew how to get 30 points, and since the 20 point subtask was easier to implement, I did that one. But I kept getting WAs until like 20 minutes later when I changed the code to account for Q < 2 and got the points. Probably should’ve asked them to change the statement at this time, but around the same time I figured out the solution to the third subtask and implemented it first. And then I forgot to ask 😭 (how did all other people who had 20-30 only ask 10 minutes before the contest ended though)

I figured that even if I miraculously get 100 on C I wouldn’t be top 5, so I decided to spend all the remaining time (20 minutes) on B. I was kind of desparate, so I saw the number of people who got AC and made a guess which made sense but I wasn’t completely sure how to prove it. I verified the solution with the 30 point subtask first, then implemented the full solution. I was very nervous because I didn’t have a lot of time left for debugging, but I eventually got it right. This was actually very lucky.

I was 2nd place and nowhere close to first place. I spent the remaining time on the brute force subtask (10 points) for C but didn’t get it.

mrmoooo was like 6th place (could’ve been better but he didn’t see the Q<=2 clarification on C) but the first place person ended up getting disqualified so he got 5th. alter had the right formula for B but didn’t believe it was actually right, and had a persistent trie solution for C that he couldn’t finish debugging, rip. This further shows how lucky I was during this round.

Our club took a picture with CodeTiger during lunch. I also spent too much time discussing / thinking about problems for indiv round so I didn’t eat a lot. Then it was team round.

Team

mrmoooo claimed A and I claimed B because I thought I was good at constructive. I had something and finished implementing at around 30 minutes. But then I realized that it was wrong for almost every single triple of numbers. I spent like 90 minutes on fixing the code (I stresstested by printing out things and pasting them on a google docs file 💀). But I got it eventually and my teammates knew how to do C so we might still end up getting second* place.

Alter told me how I could get 20 points on D (which was actually the 30 point solution), and I understood but somehow implemented it wrong and didn’t get it. In the last few minutes I decided to just farm the 20 point subtask while alter was farming subtasks for G. He got 10 points (could’ve been more, but oh well).

*We were second place on the scoreboard when the contest ended, but the first place team “Arclinux” cheated so we ended up being first place. This was kind of expected because a team with the same teamname also cheated on CALICO.

Then me, mrmoooo, alter, and a bunch of lexington people started playing cambio and mao while they finalized the results. It was pretty fun.

Awards

It started with an acapella performance by logarhythms, then there was a speech from jonathanpaulson (usaco coach) and CodeTiger’s farewell speech. CodeTiger ended the speech with a call for more in-person contests and also talked about how gpt cheaters ruin contests. As a contest organizer (which he himself founded, actually) it’s very relatable.

Anyway, for the individual round mrmoooo got 5th and I got 1st. Our team, CodeTiger OTZ OTZ OTZ, got first place on the team round. Notably I think third place team was just one person which was pretty orz.

Maybe I should start referring people by initials, it seems much simpler because people have so many different usernames, perhaps starting next blog.

School

Obligatory mention, could’ve included this in another blog but I’m lazy. I learned how lucky I actually was with having easy teachers in freshman year, and how that confidence came back to bite me when I wasn’t as lucky. Or maybe I’m actually still lucky but simply don’t work hard enough compared to others. But my sophmore GPA is currently … a bit questionable (compared to my freshman year at least). I kept bombing recent tests even though I believe I spend more time on them so I don’t know what’s happening, maybe my brain just got smaller.

Also I feel colleges shouldn’t consider GPA that much (maybe they don’t) because it actually varies a lot between different schools. Thankfully though our school has A+ so APCSA and calc can potentially save my gpa if I lock in.

USACO

If you haven’t heard, they demoted all non IOI finalists (aka camp - egoi) to gold. I can see why they did this, but I know many people who got demoted and I am also biased because I stay at plat as a result. This means that only around 20 people will be competing for the certified leaderboard though, hope I can make it this time 🙏

Also I made a manifold market which is somewhat relevant https://manifold.markets/C0DET1GER/how-many-people-from-us-will-promot

Camp chances for me this year aren’t that high in my opinion because holstein is much harder to make; there would probably be around 25 past campers / comparable seniors competing for <= 12 holstein spots, and I haven’t been grinding that much compared to many others. Well I guess I might be going to ARML then (still no A team though most likely). I will still try my best to do good each contest though, of course.

Good luck to everyone taking USACO!

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.

School

My GPA is a bit cooked now because I bombed the AP World quarter test and Spanish writing test, dipping both to an A-. My Literature & Composition grade is still cooked so I now really have a sub-4 GPA out of 4.3 😔

I’m still hopeful though because everything that’s not >= A is less than 1 point away from the next letter grade.

Also PSAT happened, I think I did alright considering that I almost didn’t study for it at all (it doesn’t matter since I’m only 10th grade). I will definitely spend some time on studying next year to get a better score.

AMC 10A

Did kind of bad

People were kind of worried about the question order being shuffled (which means that they’re different online vs. on paper), but that happened for me last time for some reason so I’m used to it.

Anyway, I had unideal pacing in the beginning (40 minutes for first 15 problems), spent quite a while on the harmonic mean problem because I didn’t use vietas and calculated wrong, then did p21 first before getting stuck on p20 for 10 minutes.

Then I decided to skip it because I’m terrible at geo, only to find that p22 and p23 are geometry as well. So I tried and did p24 and was less than 10 seconds away from getting p25 (I got the areas but had to simplify it, add the numbers, and click the answer choice) which was kind of sad.

What’s even more sad was that I ended up misreading p2. So I probably ended up with a 126 (although I’m not completely sure because we don’t have our scores yet despite taking it digitally 💀) with a distribution

60666 66666 66666 6666B 6BB6B

This was definitely not an optimal score, but I guess AMCs aren’t that important now with the new weighting. Hopefully it doesn’t cost me oly qual 🙏

Edit: I actually got a 114 oops I don’t know what else I got wrong, but I feel there’s definitely at least one misselection (not misbubble because I took it digitally) as I’m only unsure what I put for one of the problems.

I will lock in for 10B

HMMT 2025 Nov

I hate myself.

I want to say that I was just unlucky, but recent results have proven otherwise (not just math but also academics and competitive programming).

Anyways I’m the only person who was in Lexington Gamma (basically nov A team) both last year and this year due to my tryout performances. I think the people above me are just better than me though so I won’t complain. Last year I got carried to 1st place team, 10th place guts and 4th place overall, which possibly made me overconfident that we will place in something this year.

Ok so here’s the actual recap.

General Round

I got stuck on p1 for a few minutes because it’s geometry, then proceeded to complete p2-p7 with 20 minutes left. Since p8 is geo and p9 is alg, I just skipped to p10 and spent the remaining time doing it, yielding an incorrect answer. It turned out that I sillied p7 because I forgot that adding to the power of 5 also works, so my distribution for this round is just 11111 10000 which probably will not place.

Theme Round

After realizing that I got 6 in the previous round, I was aiming for a 7 in this one. In this round, I finished p1-5 without much issue, then got stuck a while on p6 but eventually got an answer. To get a 7, I would need either p7, p8, p9, and p10 (and also not silly, but I forgot about that part).

So I first tried to do p9 then realized it was probably a states bash and I didn’t want to do it so I tried p7 instead. But then I couldn’t do p7, and I decided that I should probably start checking from the back with around 5 minutes left, just to realize that my diagram for p6 was wrong. So I tried to do it again but because I’m bad at geometry I couldn’t finish before the test ended.

What’s worse was I ended up sillying p1 (did gallium instead of mercury) and p4 (misread one of the letters), so I ended up with a 3 oops. Distribution was 01101 00000. Not placing for sure. Meanwhile, one of my teammates got p1-5 + p9 which was pretty good.

Team Round

Since we didn’t do that well on indivs overall, we were hoping to lock in on this round. In the beginning of the contest, I was looking for a combinatorics problem and found p8. I didn’t see the bijection so I did some casework, then one of my teammates realized the partitions thing but I wasn’t good enough to realize that it just solved the entire problem, so I instead used it to help with my casework. Eventually I got 240 which was 14 off because I forgot about the case where he goes directly to the right after going around A.

But I didn’t realize this silly (and didn’t ask anyone to check) so I then tried to do p10 and failed because it’s geometry. Then I decided to check the earlier problems and found a smaller sum for p2, which was my only contribution in this round as I spent the remainder of the time trying to do p7. I got 5760 which was not that far but also not close at all.

I’m a self-centered person so I still don’t know what my team got, but we didn’t place.

After this, we ate pizza and some people went to Shake Shack while I went to Gong Cha with others.

Guts Round

As a combo main, I just looked for a combinatorics problem in every set and didn’t do anything when there wasn’t one.

First set I almost said that p1 was 1000 because of Wilson’s theorem, and said p2 was 73 since I thought it wasn’t asking for the sum of distinct possible values. Thankfully we ended up getting this right. I didn’t really do anything on the second set because I misread p6 and my teammate did it before me so I basically just confirmed that the answer was right. We ended up getting one wrong in this set (I still don’t know which one)

Then, on set 3, I did p9 which was triv, then got p8 but originally I counted the sum of factors instead of prime factors and ended up with a very large number 💀. On set 4 I did p11 which was also triv then p10 for which I got 68 at first because I forgot that the 0th power exists (thankfully my teammates checked and fixed it). We perfed both sets.

On set 5, I did p14 which was also pretty easy, then I tried to do p15 but couldn’t do it even after my teammate told me how to telescope. The answer we got initially was way too big, so another teammate admitted orz and got it right eventually. On set 6 I did p18 which was also relatively straightforward, then I tried to do Newtons Sums on p16 but failed because I don’t even remember the formula. My teammates got it though and we perfed this set as well (along with set 5).

However, our pacing wasn’t that great so we didn’t have a lot of time left. I did p21 and got 10/3, which I thought was for sure too low but I couldn’t figure out anything wrong with my solution. Unfortunately, this time nobody checked it so we ended up getting wrong and trailing to Clarke A by 11 poiints. I got 10/3 because my solution was that each pair of segments have a 1/3 chance of intersecting, but then I forgot that the 7th vertex is connected back to the starting one.

At this point we had around 10-15 minutes left. I instabuzzed 24/7 for p23 but then realized after 30 seconds that I forgot to add 3. Thankfully we haven’t turned in since we were trying to do other problems so we changed it to the correct answer. Then we decided to turn in and look at set 9 first before skipping to estimation.

We were 10th on the guts scoreboard, one point ahead of Clarke A, meaning that we would need one more problem to secure a top 10 spot in guts (the scoreboard froze). So I looked at p25, which didn’t look that bad. But instead of recursion, I could only come up with some swapping casework. Then one of my teammates said 38 because 1 + 36 + 1, and I felt that sounded close enough so we turned in and had around 4 minutes left for estimation. But we didn’t really get anything close and probably ended up getting 0 points and wasting 4 minutes.

Awards

Not much to say. One of my teammates got 10th on theme which was admitting, and Lexington Delta got 5th place on team. We didn’t end up getting anything as a team.

I’m still mad about how I did, especially during guts. I feel that on a better day we could definitely have placed. I could’ve told someone how I solved p21 and they might’ve caught my mistake. I might’ve figured out the recursion for p25 if I wasn’t as stressed. Hell, I would’ve cared to spend one minute to bash p25 and find out that our answer is wrong. But I didn’t, and this will forever stay a regret.

I might just sign up for November next year, as I am clearly not ready for February (not that I’m confident that I will be skilled enough to get in).

I hope that I will perform good enough in AMC 10B, MMATHS, and PUMaC to prove myself wrong.

Last year today, I created this blog. I can’t believe that time has passed by so fast, I still remember how I wanted to keep the blog active and post every one / two weeks.

I completely forgot about my blog during summer vacation and was kind of busy with LIT / club stuff so I haven’t posted for 4 months. I actually did type some things but didn’t feel like posting them so this is going to be very long.

End of School Year 24-25

School

It was kind of funny that the Quarter 1 Recap turned out to be my only post about school. This was the aspect of life I worried about the most when I moved to the United States this year, and thus I decided to put this part in the beginning.

And it turned out to be much better than I originally imagined. While there was several setbacks, I eventually managed to keep a good GPA. Luck was certainly a significant factor here; I originally had an A- in science because I’m mad zro but my GOATED science teacher decided that my grade was close to an A so bumped my grade up. The rest of my teachers were all nice and none of them were too harsh on grading, so I might not have achieved what I had with different teachers. Hopefully I could be as lucky in sophomore year and the rest of high school 🙏.

I also got to know many interesting people (mostly from Math Team / LexMACS though, which may be problematic…) Thankfully school (at least freshman year) wasn’t as stressful as I imagined it would be.

Competitive Programming

This was also very important to me (as the current tag with the most posts). This blog was originally intended for myself to record my performances and reflect upon my weaknesses after contests, but I later decided to write about other stuff like math and school since those were interesting experiences worth reflecting as well.

I was also pretty lucky this year during important contests (e.g. USACO, codeforces isn’t that important so my rating went down) now that I think about it.

Math

I kind of just gave up on this later in the year (didn’t really practice much after AIME) but I still went to math team and got to know many people which was nice. I hope I could participate in more competitions next year (I didn’t go to PuMAC because my math wasn’t good enough to make it, and ARML because it’s the same time as camp) and hopefully get top 10 in something since it feels very good. I also hope to qualify for USAJMO but I don’t really have as strong of a desire to make / do good in oly as many other people in math team, which could make myself less motivated to grind.

Start of School Year 25-26

This will only be about school since I haven’t been doing a lot of competitive programming nor math (I bombed the math team tryouts which was kind of deserved to be honest).

Basically now I’m taking AP Bio, AP Calculus BC, AP Computer Science A, AP World History, Honors Spanish II, Composition and Arranging (music), and Honors Literature & Composition II (but we have honors for all so nobody cares).

My teachers are all pretty nice at least as of now (I probably got lucky again), although my GPA might be below 4.0 this year because I have a B+ in literature and my A is borderline for both biology and world history. I’m also kind of worried about spanish although my grade isn’t that bad yet because I’m taking it with a bunch of freshmen who have 2 more years of spanish experience than I do (they started learning in middle school), so I feel there’s some sort of knowledge / experience gap no matter how much I try.

Our club (LexMACS, you should join if you’re in Lexington!) also had our first meeting which went okay I guess considering that it is our first year and we’re just sophomores. Hopefully most of the people will remain active.

Lexington Informatics Tournament 2025

It actually went pretty well. There were some issues but overall they didn’t impact the contest too much. I picked & prepared most of the problems for Standard Round and created F and H. The quality of the problems itself is ok (at least people didn’t criticize it a lot), but unfortunately some of the testcases were a bit weak.

Here I will share the editorial for problem F and H, as well as my take on AI / cheating

Tyger Sort (~2200)

I personally liked this problem because the solution code is short yet the problem is not too easy & does not rely on a lot of knowledge.

Problem Here

Portals (~2700)

Unfortunately I don’t know how to create 2700 rated problems so this one is kind of standard and requires advanced algorithms. A lot of teams got a score of 700 as they didn’t solve this one, but sadly ChatGPT could (probably the $200 version? since it couldn’t solve when I tested). While being the hardest, this was also the least favorite problem I have ever created (not that I have many).

Problem Here

My Take on AI / Cheating

Well there isn’t really much to say. My opinion is probably going to be similar to the majority and there isn’t really any innovative idea here, so it is just going to be me yapping.

This year, we had a cheating (i.e. using AI to solve problems) rate of over 30% in LIT Standard round. Some people were not aware that AI was not allowed, but after we made the rule crystal clear by making announcements and adding (in bolded text) this to the top of the standard round page, the cheating rate did not drop.

What’s perhaps the most heartbreaking is that many of these cheaters beat a lot of legitimate participants, which could potentially discourage them, or even at an extreme, make them to cheat as well. And it has been noted that a lot of these cheaters are repeated offenders (cheated in other contests as well), which feels weird to me because why would you want to keep cheating just to get caught again and again?

Maybe they thought that one day they would get good enough at cheating to escape the consequences. But what is the point of wasting 3 hours pasting problems into ChatGPT, altering the code to make it look human (not understanding anything at all), and submitting hoping that the solution is correct?

I have always hated cheaters who used AI (or just cheaters in general actually), especially after they got better than me. Although people keep saying that rating is just a number and I hope I do as well, in reality I just couldn’t convince myself into not caring about this “number.” Every time I do bad I blame myself first, but then when I realize that there was over 100 cheaters ranked above me I would be very disappointed (most are removed after the contest though, thanks Mike!)

It’s very unlikely that you reading this are a cheater but if you are, I hope that you can realize your mistakes and never cheat again. It does not help you at all long term, and I know this blog is not capable of changing anything (I hope it is), and you should stop doing these competitions if you don’t love them enough to even solve problems legitimately. What you are doing would only hurt those who truly enjoy competitive programming and does not do you any good (well maybe your resume, but WHO cares about codeforces ratings)

Also I want to talk about Meta Hacker Cup Round 1 which just took place a few days ago. People keep complaining about cheaters and whining that plagiarism checks aren’t completed. What I want to say is that due to its special format (only submitting output), plagiarism checks can’t really be done and cheaters would probably not be removed unfortunately. They ask you to submit your code but you can always just submit a brute force / even a blank file and claim that you accidentally submitted the wrong thing. Also based opinion: if you only solved A1A2B1 you shouldn’t make Round 2 anyway so stop complaining. I understand that this is contradictory to what I just said and I would probably think differently if my performance wasn’t as good as it was (top 100).

Goals for this School Year

After a year, I’ve become even lazier so I will just list my main goals consisely

• Make USACO Camp
• Top 10 in a Platinum contest
• Codeforces Grandmaster
• AtCoder Yellow (1 Dan+)
• Make USAJMO
• Get top 10 in some math competition
• Make PRIMES (?)
• Make USAAIO Round 2 and get something
• Make USAPHO (not camp, also I’m not that good at physics so I don’t expect to get anything)
• Make NACLO Invitational
• 4.0+ GPA
• Play table tennis maybe I haven’t for over a year and probably got significantly worse

Prologue

I haven’t posted for over a month, partly because I was busy on school work but also because I started preparing for USACO Camp after I received the invitation on April 28th. The main purpose of this post is for my future self to look back on this fun, memorable experience, while people who are interested and dedicated in competitive programming could have a glimpse into the USACO Camp experience.

Campers are divided into two groups: “Holsteins” and “Guernseys.” The Holsteins, consisting mostly of returning campers (with certain exceptions such as DottedCalculator / bronze_coder), compete for a spot on the IOI team. The schedule for Guernseys is more intensive on lectures, since it consists of first-time campers. EGOI Campers are also divided into Holsteins and Guernseys in the same manner, although being a Holstein does not give an advantage (since their extra contest isn’t counted for selection).

We had 13 Holsteins and 11 Guernseys this year (I was a Guernsey).

Day 1

I flew from Boston to Atlanta alone. The flight took 2.5 hours and landed at around 14:34. We gathered at Taco Bell which I spent a few minutes finding. Met people that I knew online such as Ryan, Rohan, Tristan, Dennis, and many more.

We were originally scheduled to leave at around 4-5, but the bus kept going to the wrong place and ended up being 2 hours late. We decided to play some card games after waiting a while outside the airport. Originally there’s only 4 people so we were playing Cambio, but as more people joined we kept switching games. We eventually settled on Secret Hitler when there was around 10 people, which would turn out to become one of the main card games we play during USACO Camp this year. We stopped for dinner at around 9, and arrived Clemson University after 11PM. We then got some shirts, a binder with the schedule and campus maps, and blankets for sleeping. My roommate was Ray Zhao.

Day 2

In the morning, we had breakfast sponsored by Citadel. After that was orientation, which introduced the basic structure / schedule of the camp, then a practice contest. Before lunch, we were introduced to the Terminal contest and had a infosession about Citadel, where I saw Benq the first time in real life. My teammate for the terminal contest was Brian Xue.

After lunch, we had a 4 hour lecture while the Holsteins had an interesting “Community Service”. Then we went to an escape room where I didn’t make any significant contribution. We were very close to escaping (with a few hints). It was pretty fun regardless and I got to know many people better. On the way back Larry also taught me and some others how to play Castlefall. Some interesting manifold markets were created today.

Day 3

We played ultimate frisbee in the morning after breakfast. It was pretty fun overall although I’m not good at throwing frisbees at all. I kind of stopped running as much towards the end since there was a contest after and I didn’t want to get too tired for that.

We then took our first contest, which went extremely well for me. Rank: 5/24 (I don’t think I should say anything else since the problems may be used in future USACO monthlies)

After contest review and dinner we had an enrichment lecture about bioinformatics.

Day 4

We had a problem creation exercise in the morfning (Guernseys randomly paired with Holsteins). I also advertised to some people about LIT (Lexington Informatics Tournament) to some extent. I was paired with Linda Zhao and we created a relatively easy problem.

After lunch, the Holsteins had their second contest while we had a 6 hour DS lecture. Ryan Fu made a funny meme about this:

After that we had another enrichment lecture about heuristics, followed by an Open lab (for the Terminal contest) for Guernseys and contest review for the Holsteins. Then, after we returned to the dorms, we played some more castlefall with coaches.

Day 5

Today was the “Fun Day,” which was meant for us to relax for a bit in the midpoint of camp. We had an excursion to an arcade in the morning which featured laser tag and a bowling alley. I turned out to be very bad at bowling but at least i got a positive number of strikes.

We had pizza lunch there, then went back to Clemson University for “BenQ’s boot camp.” We learned about floor sums and had a team contest about it after. DottedCalculator dominated as I expected. After that was dinner, then another open lab. Brian showed me his bot and I finally understood how terminal worked.

Day 6

New breakfast place! Notably I only knew where to get water in this new place near the end of camp since it was not intuitive at all.

We had another enrichment lecture about planar graphs after breakfast, then there was a contest strategy discussion by Benq. He mentioned that in one of the recent codeforces contests, if he did the problems in reversed order, he might have won against rainboy. He also disagreed with some of the strategies while reading the document which was pretty funny.

We took our second contest with the Holsteins after lunch (EGOI finalists took a different contest this time). The contest went good for me this time as well. Rank: 11/24

After that we had contest review, then a “charades” activity on algorithms and data structures. Although our team lost by a few points, it was very interesting and fun overall. This was followed by a college / career discussion, where we got to learn about what the coaches did after they graduated from high school / college.

Day 7

In the morning (after breakfast) we had the last open lab, where we finalized and submitted our team’s code (teamscode) for the Terminal Contest. After that, we went to an ice cream place, where we designed ice cream flavors and voted for the best one. The winning flavor was “red panda icecream,” and we actually got to try it and it was surprisingly good!

After that (and lunch) we had a shorter (as in 4 hours long) lecture, which talked about important topics that weren’t covered in previous lectures.

For dinner it was pretty normal except we had like 1000 kids from a football(?) camp who crowded and broke the soda fountain which was unfortunate. We had a short bus ride to a mini-golf place. It was in groups of four, so I was with Ryan, Dennis, and Ruoyu. Since I have never played mini-golf before, I got a hole in 11, but Dennis got a hole in 22 which was very funny.

Day 8

In the morning, we had an IOI Styled contest (as in 9:00-14:00, I know this probably isn’t a thing). I did worse again in this contest, definitely could’ve done better with a better contest strategy but I’ll take it. Rank: 17/24 (you might notice that my ranks form an arithmetic sequence, and interestingly, my scores do as well).

Then we had tacos / burritos for lunch before contest review. After that, we took group photos, then there was the scheduled terminal tournament which unfortunately didn’t happen because of technical issues, so we had more contest review instead.

After that, we had dinner in a special place since the awards ceremony would happen there as well. We had some special awards at first, where I got another cow plushie for problemsetting and Alexander Wang got a cow pillow for beating Professor Dean in bowling. We also noticed on the Terminal website that Alexander Wang and Guoguo Gong won the Terminal competition! Congrats for getting iPads! Then Alexander Wang left for ARML which is admitting.

We also got certificates and the IOI & EGOI teams were announced. Congrats to Rain Jiang, Brian Xue, Bing-Dong Liu, and Alex Chen for making IOI, and Grace Li, Luna Hudman, Helen Law, and Pearl Yu for making EGOI! Good luck!!

I stayed up until 2, playing fish, castlefall, secret hitler, and Mao

Day 9

SIX FLAGS!!!

After checking out of our dorms, we had a 2-3 hour bus ride to Six Flags. On our way, we played more than 100 games of castlefall (it’s probably less than 100 because we accidentally skipped rounds but I don’t care). It was raining at around 1, but fortunately the rain stopped after we finished having lunch. I went on quite a few rides, and it was a very fun expierence! However, this also meant that Camp was almost over…

We went to a pizza place for dinner, then we went to the Hilton Atlanta Airport Hotel. I was in a room with Nick and Julian, and it was kind of funny because Professor Dean didn’t know who to give the room key card when he saw “jwu.” I played some exploding kittens, secret hitler, and castlefall with coaches and campers until 2.

Day 10

My plane was at around 11, so we got on the 8:30 shuttle. I filled out the breakfast form but didn’t take anything because I was too lazy to. I got back to Boston at around 3.

Epilogue

Thank you Professor Dean, coaches, and campers, for making USACO Camp such a fun expierence! I expected USACO Camp to just be coding all day, which made me slightly worried at first (especially about contest performance etc.), but it turned out to be more chill than I thought, and I got to meet orz campers and coaches which is super cool! This sort of serves as a motivation for me to grind harder and try to return next year, although it would certainly be a difficult journey considering that my scores in Platinum this season were lower than most other campers.

Also unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures, so if you want a visual idea of what USACO Camp is like, check out Triatan’s VLog!

M{IT}^2 Spring 2025

I was actually a little hesitant on whether I should do this. Of course, it would be a nice contest experience, but since there’s no way I could be invited into the Onsite Contest, I didn’t really know what I was competing for. Additionally, on the week of round 1 there was BrUMO and on the week of round 2 there was SMT Online, meaning that competing in this would further take both weekends away from me. Still, I decided to compete because … why would I choose not to procrascinate notecard-making to do something I enjoy?

Round 1

Problems
Score - 400
Penalty - 2:40:22
Rank - 176

I did somewhat poorly on this round. I thought that 2025 had to appear in the end of the number for some reason, making me do something that’s more complicated instead of just adding zeroes in the end.

I thought I was already a lot behind at this point, so when I was trying to do problem 2, I didn’t really think what I was using before coding, so I ended up having a bunch of unused sets and vectors which created some problems.

Problem 3 was lighter for me – I came up with a greedy and proved it in a few minutes. Then for problem 4, I was stuck for quite a while at first, but then I figured that a lot of people did it pretty quick, meaning that the core idea isn’t that difficult. I quickly came up with a solution after that and solved the problem in 20 minutes. However, since my penalty was quite high, my rank continued dropping until around 200 in the end.

Looking at the scoreboard again after the contest, I was quite surprised that there was only around 600 competitors, instead of the 1000 I expected. But then, even more unfortunately, more than 100 of them were cheaters (by using LLMs?), making the final cutoff for round 2 a score of 50.

Round 2

Problems
Score - 310
Penalty - 4:32:24
Rank - 78

I did better in this round (although it’s still not too great, I’ll take this). I got problem 1 right after one submission, then quickly read problem 2 and did the 10 point subtask. This made my rank 5th place at the time, which was interesting (although it’s just because nobody farms partials in the beginning of the contest).

Then, since there was about the same amount of ACs for problems 2 and 3, I kept switching between the two. Eventually, I got the M = 0 subtask on problem 2 first, then obtained full points a few minutes after with some implementation issues in the process.

While thinking about problem 3, I originally thought that the intended time complexity was O(n^2), but then only realized after the contest that the small n was only used for the checker. I was stuck on that idea for about 20 minutes, then realized that having 4 colors instead of the 3 probably meant something. I figured out the intended solution, but then proceeded to spend 20 minutes on debugging.

Then for the remaining hour I got the 10 point subtask for problem 4 and failed to make my cheese solution pass. I felt much better this time because I know / have heard of most of the people that placed above me (unlike last time).

SMT Online 2025

This is probably my second time doing a math contest online? This time my team is called Lexington Babies because it consists of 8 freshmen! (other Lexington teams include Lexington Sophomores, Lexington Sophomores Rejects, and Lexington Elders)

Power

I’ve never really done a power round with time pressure (i.e. less than two hours long) before. The previous (and only) time I did a power round was during BMT Online, where I barely contributed. This time though the power round contributes to 30% of our team aggregates, making it considerably more important.

Since 5 people in our team went to problem 1, I went to look at problem 2 first but since 2 other people were doing it I ended up soloing problem 3 which … did not go well. I don’t really have experience with power rounds, so in the end I only ended up doing from 3.1 to half of 3.6 why am I so bad at this. There was some questions that I could’ve done but didn’t due to time constraints, welp.

Team

Overall I did worse than power but since I could be carried by my orz teammates this time it doesn’t really matter that much.

I looked at p6 first and got a wrong answer after around 10 minutes. Then people said that they were stuck on p1 which was the GOATED problem a problem that I have seen before. So I solved it in 20 seconds (which only involves recalling the answer from my memory), and this was basically my only contribution.

I tried to find combo problems because I’m a combo main, but turned out an admitter solved p9 before I did and I was too dumb to solve p14.

Subject Tests

I took algebra and discrete because I’m bad at geometry and although I took the AP Calculus BC exam before, I forgot all my calculus in one year. Something that’s annoying though is that discrete includes combinatorics and number theory, which is a huge debuff considering I’m very bad at number theory as well (C >> A >>> N = G).

But before that we went home and because of the timing of everything (lunch times etc. were based on PST), I figured that I wouldn’t have any time to have dinner until around 8, so I ate a bunch of snacks during their scheduled lunch time. I took algebra first (didn’t really have a choice, sadly).

Algebra

I went through problems 1-4 relatively fast then got stuck on problem 5. I then figured out the main observation (does this even count as an observation?) for problem 6 after around 10 minutes and spent 10 more minutes to get an answer that turned out to be off by 63 because I accidentally misread my work and used 31^2 instead of 32^2. After some checking, with 18 minutes left, I went to look at the tiebreaker question since based on experience I usually end up doing nothing in the last 20 minutes. I also thought that the tiebreaker would be important for me because a 5 + good tiebreaker might be top 20%?

So I got that the answer was something like 5000 + 4999/5001 + … + 1/10000. I had a temptation to use integrals to estimate this, but then I figured out that I only had 10 minutes left for some reason so I just put in 7014.3414 and went back to do some other problems again. I then found out that both p5 and the slightly intimidating p7 were actually easy, and I got p5 but for p7 I ended up getting (F_2 + F_3 + … + F_28) * log_3(2) and the contest ended before I finished computing the sum 😭 If I hadn’t spent so much time on the tiebreaker I would’ve gotten it, which would be much safer for top 20%.

Distribution: 11111 00000

Discrete

Similar to algebra I got problems 1-4 and checked them first, then got stuck on problem 5 for a while. Eventually I got it with a weird way that didn’t involve linearity of expectation, and confirmed it using engineer’s induction. I had a temptation to skip through problem 6 to problem 7 but I didn’t and decided to skip to the tiebreaker instead. This time though I learned my lesson, so I only spent around 3 minutes and guessed 15.41434 which was probably a bad tiebreaker but whatever.

Then, I found out that problem 6 was not that hard after struggling for 15 minutes and got the correct answer. I then went to problem 7, which looked somewhat related to this codeforces problem. I only remembered that it involved a greedy where if two strings a and b have the property that a + b is lexographically smaller than b + a, then a must appear before b. And since being lexographically larger means the number is larger, I sort of used this idea and got 88609, which was off by 2 because I forgot that 202 and 20 weren’t supposed to appear before 2025. I spent the remainder of my time checking instead of reading problem 8 but I didn’t catch any sillies.

Distribution: 11111 10000

Guts

I don’t really remember about this, but I think I basically got carried in this round. We did not cook though; we got one problem wrong in each of the first two sets…

Some other stuff…

Now Quarter 3 officially ended, meaning that I’m becoming a sophomore after one more quarter (and the summer vacation of course). I did not expect time to go by this fast; I don’t even think I know a lot of people or about Lexington High School itself … I still feel like a freshman that just entered high school, and I might feel that way forever.

USACO Camp emails still aren’t out yet, which is expected but at the same time annoying because I don’t know whether I’m attending ARML.

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.

Score: 269
Distribution: 167 (7 testcases) / 102 (4 testcases) / 0

I did not cook again. Nor was this an extremely bad score considering my skill (getting a 717 in 2024 December Gold which wasn’t even that hard). This makes my net score 1184 if open wasn’t weighted, but since it is likely my camp chances might be cooked.

I looked at the three problems and quickly realized that there’s no way I could get points on p3 so I skipped it which turned out to be a wise decision. Not really much happened during the contest, I just spent too much time trying to code (and debug) obvious fakesolves.

For problem 1, I somehow thought that it would always be optimal to pick either a rectangle that has the leftmost rightend or a rectangle that has the bottommost top end (?). I, being used to codeforces contests, decided that this solution wasn’t too hard to implement and attempted to “prove by AC”. Unfortunately, proving by AC only works if the solution is actually correct. For problem 2, I also derived some weird fakesolve (which didn’t even pass samples!) that took me an hour to implement.

USACO Camp decisions won’t come out until mid-late April, which also means that I’m not really sure whether I should register for ARML. If I had gotten a 400 or so I wouldn’t hesitate but … this is reality I guess.

This post isn’t really that much about USACO and competitive programming though, since the only thing I’ve done was being anxious.

CMIMC

And then there’s CMIMC. The trip was a fun experience overall (this was actually the first travel competition I’ve ever attended). On Friday our plane got delayed so we had lunch at like 4. Then we went to play frisbee and later went to estimathon (we won!).

The Theoretical Computer Science round was kind of interesting because I’ve never done one of these rounds before (except for practicing in math team). But it turned out that we didn’t do too good on that round either despite me being a USACO main. On team the only thing I did was p1 and solving p2 at the last second but not having enough time to change our wrong answer.

During individuals I ABSOLUTELY SOLD (distribution was strictly less than 434 oops). I probably should’ve been in Lexington Epsilon. I can’t really say anything though since CMIMC (and perhaps math in general) isn’t as important as USACO is to me or USA(J)MO is to other people, so I probably shouldn’t be ranting too much.

On our way back my seat was changed for some reason, making me sit with a stranger instead of Lexington people. The wifi also didn’t work on our way back, so I basically just idled for an hour.

Other

Obviously my 226.5 JMO index was lower than the 233.5 cutoff, but since I wasn’t prepared anyway and would spend more time on preparing for USACO, I don’t really feel too bad about that. I also probably got a 10 in F=ma (got p1, p4, p6, p8, p9, p10, p11, and guessed the rest), which is much lower than a 15 so I don’t have anything to regret about.

There was also picoCTF and vyx7 & other LexMACS people admitted orz (33th place in US High School or below). In the beginning of the window I just stole all the easy problems and pretended that I contributed. I’ll (probably) also become one of the LIT organizers which means that I probably can’t participate in LIT 2024 standard round even if it somehow miraculously happens.

Unfortunately, my GPA fell off so now I likely won’t have one higher than 4.1 anymore.

The only thing I can hope for now is to not do bad in USACO Open, hopefully a 300+ (or even 400+) score. I don’t want all my luck in December, January and February to be for nothing.

My birthday also passed recently, so now I’m 15 years old.

Score: 494, the distribution was 333 / 56 / 105

The contest went pretty well, perhaps even better than the January contest. I quickly (in the first 30 minutes) got the main observation for problem 1. Although I proceeded to spend 1 hour on implementation, I just felt confident that I could pull a >400 score again with the 2.5 hours remaining.

So I was pretty calm and relaxed and got 494 with 1 hour remaining. Maybe some parts of me thought this was good enough, while some other parts of me still thought I should try to full solve another problem, since this would probably be enough to make it to the leaderboard.

I just thought p2 was probably actually easy and it had a lot of subtasks that could hopefully get me to a >500 score so I spent the remaining hour doing p2 and got 0 points. But I guess this was fine since I still don’t think I would’ve gotten p3 anyway.

I feel the style of platinum contests, or perhaps even gold, have changed a lot. At least noticably there hasn’t been as much graph problems (0 in plat, not sure how many in gold), and the problems are more ad-hoc in general. Perhaps this benefits me since I’m probably an ad-hoc main, but this would probably mean that even if I somehow make USACO camp, I would still have to rely on this kind of different style to perform well.

Hopefully I don’t throw USACO Open along with my camp chances 🙏 People say an average of >300 should make but I don’t know how much more USACO open is weighted so it’s a little scary. Why isn’t the cutoffs for camp disclosed 😭.

I also hope USACO could let us know our rank within people in the United States who took the contest (maybe certified). Last time I got 421, which was apparently a very common score, and it was rank 49. I have no idea how this converts to the rank in the United States (or perhaps if we limit it to certified people).

Reposting manifold market
https://manifold.markets/C0DET1GER/will-i-make-usaco-camp-in-2025?play=true

My manifold net worth tripled in February which was … nice?

Some Stuff

Originally we were going to take aime i but because of snow day we had to take aime ii. This may be kind of good because historically aime ii has lower cutoffs (and I don’t feel the tests are harder). But maybe this time cracked regions are taking aime ii which will inflate the cutoffs idk.

So I had aime ii and f=ma on the same day (f=ma was delayed to like 5:45-7:00), which probably didn’t make that much of a difference since there’s no way I could’ve gotten >=14 in f=ma. (I’m just bad like that)

I didn’t really expect anything to be honest. Like of course my goal is to make jmo, but I knew that it’s not that likely considering how I would’ve thrown both AMCs if not because I was lucky (and still didn’t get 140+ for AMC 10A, but I guess 136.5 is fine). Also that I haven’t been doing that much math lately since my main objective is to make usaco camp I guess (impossible)

In last year’s aime, I sillied (maybe some of them don’t really count as sillies) my way from 8 to 5, giving me like a 170 index. That’s why I didn’t really expect myself to make jmo, and maybe that turned out to be the right mindset, since I wasn’t too nervous before / during the test.

AIME

For p1, in the beginning my lengths were all wrong because I kept misreading the letters in the lenghts. But at least I finally managed to solve it after like 7 minutes. Then I did p2-4 in the next 15 minutes and found out there’s two geo in a row.

I kind of wanted to skip both since I’m a geo antimain and I didn’t want the geos to give me emotional damage for the entire test. But then I remembered that it’s just p5 and p6 which will hopefully not be too hard. So I spent 20 more minutes and did both.

Then I just kind of skimmed through the next 5 problems and found that 4 / maybe 5 of them were combo which somehow boosted my confidence. And they turned out not to be too hard so I got 7, 8, 9, and 11 in the next 30 minutes or so (I didn’t know how to p10 because all I could think of was a 16 * 8 * 3 dp skull)

So now I had 105 minutes left and did 10 problems, but I thought the ten I did were easy so I probably needed more if I wanted to get lucky and make jmo. I didn’t really spend a lot of time on p12 and p14 because geo. So I started trying to do p13.

Then I suddenly wanted to go to the bathroom but somehow thought that I had to submit early if I wanted to go so I held it for 30 minutes. Until I figured I should actually ask and turned out I could go without submitting early 💀 (and this submitting early rule probably only applied to my elementary school exams). Going to the bathroom earlier probably wouldn’t have made a difference though since I was trying to do p13 the entire time.

I kind of wanted to do more problems, but then thought a 236.5 would likely be enough to qualify for jmo, but that also meant I needed 0 sillies which is impossible. So I went to check my work and caught 4 sillies (p4 multiply by 1/3 instead of 3, p5 I did multiplication wrong, p9… don’t know what to say it’s just entirely wrong, and p11 I had 95 because I forgot about numbers that weren’t divisors of 24)

This was satisfying, but also extremely terrifying at the same time. This meant my aime score would’ve been like 4 points lower (at least I thought it would be 4 points lower). These 40 minutes of checking really made a big difference.

Then I proceeded to think about p10 since it’s the only combo problem left. Got it in about 10 minutes, and I immediately checked and caught a silly. Spent about 5 more minutes and found that I only had 10 minutes left so I couldn’t really do anything. Well, I checked my work but didn’t find any more sillies.

Reflection

so distribution was like
11111 11011 00000 (got p8 and p11 wrong)

For p8 I forgot that 55 existed so I wrote 800 😭 I wouldn’t count that as a silly but idk
For p11 I remembered that 8 was 0 the first time but then completely forgot that it was 0 when I was correcting it 💀

So my jmo index went from 246.5 to 226.5

Definitely not optimal, but considering that I didn’t even anticipate jmo, this was better than I thought. But perhaps qualifying or not wouldn’t matter that much either, since I’m bad at proofs and stuff –> will probably get like a 0 on jmo anyway and flagged a cheater

And I might’ve been cooked in F=ma, we don’t talk about that

👍

Score: 421 (distribution is like 333 / 26 / 62)

I think I performed okay in this contest, at first I thought that 421 was pretty good but turned out it’s probably because p1 was very very easy (I thought so too). The thing is I worshipped CodeTiger before contest and got one problem, so surely if I worshipped a bit more I would’ve gotten 2…

But the thing is many people unfortunately skipped p1 in the beginning (like me). I only went back to look at p1 (and solve it after like 30 minutes) because I was so desparate with my sub 100 score.

I still don’t know why I didn’t get subtask 2 for problem 2 though, will probably have to wait until sunday when they release the testcases and stuff to find out. I made the right observation, but still couldn’t manage to solve even the subtask 😭

I hope to camp this year, although that seems pretty much impossible considering my skill. But I’ve heard that they considered improvement arcs so hopefully 767 in gold –> 421 in plat is good enough. I guess I’ll have to get lucky in two more contests, or maybe get extremely lucky in open.

MITIT also happened recently, we were CodeTiger ORZ ORZ ORZ so we got first in hs beginner and second in overall beginner. Kind of sold for not being able to do p8 and p9, but a 900 isn’t really that different from a 735 as long as we got first place I guess

Also just realized that AIME is next week, and I forgot to do any OTIS 💀

And I made a manifold market lol
https://manifold.markets/C0DET1GER/will-i-make-usaco-camp-in-2025?play=true
buy no for free mana.

Basically I decided that I should actually be productive during the christmas break. I also virtualed a USACO plat contest, paken 2023 day 1, paken 2023 day 3, and JOI 2023 but I’m kinda too lazy to write so many blogs.

Day 1

Tasks here

Virtual

Reflection

Day 2

Tasks here

After Day 1 I actually gained a bit of confidence in my poor OI ability, maybe perhaps too much

Virtual

Reflection

Final Results

Turns out 716 qualified for plat (cutoff is 700 this time). Only 20 promotions in USA which seems pretty much unexpected, but still pretty happy about it.

I need to lock in during the Christmas break or I’ll likely get a 0 in plat sadge

Still not much to say really, still sad

Score: 716 (333 / 50 / 333 distrib)

I feel that I’m probably not promoting tbh

Basically I looked at all three problems first then figured that p3 seems to be pretty well known and I might’ve even solved it before. Then I spent like 40 minutes on trying some random greedy that did not work. Then I decided to go look at the other problems.

First p1. I looked at the subtasks and thought that it could do with sqrt and wrote some kind of Nsqrt(N)log^2(N)-ish solution (I thought that there’s only one log because I suck at time complexity, which was also why I decided to implement it). It only failed three testcases. I moved on because three testcases didn’t really seem to matter right now.

This was about at the 1 hour mark since I passed (most of) p1 relatively quickly. Then I looked at p2 and had no idea. I thought of dp for subtask 2 but nothing beyond that. I decided that “p3 must actually be very easy” and put 2 more additional hours on that problem. I just started having random ideas and found out that greedy actually worked. It’s a rather short implementation so I ACed the problem at around the 3 hour mark.

At this time my score was about 600, and I figured that the 3 testcases might actually matter. (At this point I still didn’t notice that my time complexity had two logs) I thought that it must’ve been a constant problem, so I removed the “define int long long” and other unnecessary code to pass all testcases.

I had 666 points, and since p1 and p3 seemed to be relatively easy (although I had a skill issue and spent 3 hours on them), I thought the cutoff would be around 800. This also meant that I would have to solve subtask 3 in the remaining hour. This didn’t seem too bad, but I thought I should solve subtasks 1 and 2 first to secure a score above 700. Then, since I had a significant skill issue I spent about 30 minutes to solve those subtasks after I had the idea for dp (the main thing was that my solution was different and implementation heavy I guess).

Then I just spent the remaining 30 minutes thinking about how to solve subtask 3 and not solving it (which is essentially doing nothing)

After the contest, people seem to say that the cutoff will be around 750. I hope that the cutoff is 700, although it seems realistically impossible ngl.

Still hope that the cutoff is 700 (or lower) 🥺 I still want a chance to camp in 9th grade, even if it’s 0.000000001%

I also learned that I’m not the only CF master clowning in USACO gold

Oh well there isn’t much to say so I guess I won’t make any subtitles

Basically I did get DHR in 10A (and did not in 10B), which is probably the only thing I’m happy about recently. Totally threw in BMT, and I don’t seem prepared myself for USACO. I also might be cooked in Literature 💀

And NHSPC (a Taiwanese contest for high schoolers) also happened recently, @the_researching_pooh @69manweiwei @leolin orz

Finally, hopefully I get lucky enough tomorrow and advance into Platinum :) I don’t know why but advancing really seems so hard and impossible to me, I can’t even AK when I look at past problems now. And LMT is also happening tomorrow, but because it clashes with USACO certified period I’m not going, sad

Social

Alright seems that the “not socializing with homeroom people” strategy is not working out smh

I don’t know whether this is normal but I only have one person in my homeroom I share science with, and zero in all other classes (excluding PE). I also barely share studies with people in my homeroom.

Another thing is that our male-female ratio is like 1:2, and I’m not the type of person that talks with girls a lot, which makes things even worse.

Other classes are much better though than homeroom imo, at least I talk to people.

CP

I didn’t really do CP a lot this quarter, I guess I will fall back to specialist on CF soon.

I haven’t really done any contests recently after I reached master, maybe just one AtCoder contest and an HSCSA contest. I feel I should practice more OI though, I haven’t practiced a lot and will probably throw OI contests for not getting any partials.

Also LIT is currently indefinitely postponed, so I might fail my C1 goal miserably 🤡 Hopefully it will eventually happen, although I might still not get first in middle school division because I’m bad.

Academics

Not too bad I guess.

In the beginning my grades were bad for Earth Science but it went back up later after all the tests and other stuff. On the contrary, my humanities (Literature + Social Studies) grades gradually dropped as the quarter passed. At least I successfully kept my GPA above 4.

Current GPA: 4.13, might still change though since grades are not final until like 11/18. I’m pretty glad that my teachers aren’t too harsh on grading.

Math

I feel there’s much more math contests here, and math team people are very orz.

A good thing about LHS I guess is that there’s a lot of orz people and I can learn from them instead of having to do everything myself. Also that I can be carried in contests like HMMT which feels very nice.

The tryouts went out nicely for me, at least I didn’t silly too much, which placed me in teams that may be higher than my capability. I’ll try my best not to do nothing I guess.

I originally thought that math team had meetings too often, but because of the half days and all the breaks it turns out not to be that many.

And I kind of stopped doing OTIS after school started which is bad, I’ve completed 2 units after the summer break and only 2 units after school started. I’m currently like level 31 and I don’t know how good that is.

btw I’m not trying to say anything is a scam or something

I’m in Lex Gamma, and I’m probably the only person in the team (or maybe among everyone in LHS that came to HMMT this year) that has never competed in HMMT. Everyone in the team is way better than me tho, so I’m ready to be carried in team and guts round and drag the team down in individual rounds.

General Round

I did problems 1-6 and 8 and didn’t even look at the other problems. They announced the answers right after the test ended and I got 3 and 6 wrong which is like sad. I felt soo good when I remembered about the “15” case for problem 6 and thought that many people would probably forget about that one, but turned out that I forgot about the 195 case so I was like one off. I wouldn’t call that a silly though, as it’s my own skill issue, but I probably lost like 6 points because of this. At least I found the right pattern in problem 8 which is not too bad.

Theme Round

0 sillies in this round, but still bad

I only looked at 1-7, and 9 (because it’s combo) and didn’t know how to do 6 because I’m bad at geo. Turned out I spent too much time on 9, and didn’t really do it the right way. Although I solved 6 problems my distrib is like very bad, so I’m probably the lowest in the team.

Team Round

tnag carry orz

I probably didn’t do anything, except p1 p4 and maybe p8, which other teammates could probably have done quickly without me. We (tnag) also perfed teamround with like 5 or 10 minutes left which was nice. We ended up turning it in 30 seconds early maybe for bragging purposes, idk

And they posted the solutions on the HMMT website immediately after the teamround ended, and we ended up not sillying anything and getting a perfect score, tnag orz

Guts Round

alright this is when I really did absolutely nothing

We started pretty good in the first seven sets (perfect score on each), but we were a bit slow so we had to rush through the rest of the sets and unfortunately got 0 points in estimation. Still rank 10 which is like good compared to our scores in individual rounds lol.

Other

tnag went to int bee finals, tnag orz

I also went to both Friday night and the Sunday lectures because it’s my first time. On Friday I went to HackHMMT and unexpectedly met CorzdeTiger and Sunday stuff were interesting I guess?

Estimates

G 21.153, T 23.242, Total 44.395
G rk. 60, T rk. 60, Total rk. 70
I sold so bad :(
Let’s see how good an estimate of my score this is. I probably failed the M2 goal miserably

Aftermath

I turned out to be not too bad at predicting?

Results:
G 20.153, T 24.242, Total 44.395
G rk. 89, T rk. 44, Total rk. 65

Kinda happy that I did have something in top 50 but also kinda sad for being that close to top 50 in general and overall (well it’s not actually that close, but I just felt I was so dumb for forgetting about the 195 case)

At least I’ve finally achieved one of my goals.

Before

I was like kinda nervous, because even though this wasn’t my first time taking the AMCs (actually 10th time), it’s the first time I’m taking it digitally, and I’m afraid that I would mess up. I probably had to be extra careful as I thought it’s easier to misclick something and ruin my entire test.

Last time I wasn’t rlly satisfied with my score (120 on an extremely easy test), so I don’t want to have bad time management again. I also hope that my AMC10 scores won’t be like my AMC8 ones (strictly decreasing arithmetic sequence). I sillied so bad in the past (4 sillies on AMC8 after reviewing my answers !!!)

The test (?)

So although I was a bit nervous, I tried to tell myself to stay calm, that there’s always a 10B and I had little chances to get into JMO anyway. Still, I didn’t expect the Commons I (where we took the AMC10 in LHS) to be that crowded, which somehow made me even more anxious.

I originally wanted to use some kind of strategy like starting from the middle so that I would feel more confident, but then thought that would be worse as I might not even be able to solve those problems :(

I spent like 2 minutes solving p1 because I was so afraid I might silly the first problem. Then I looked at p2, and this was when all the disaster started.

I stared at the problem for 1 minute, trying to understand it, and finally understood it. But I was afraid that I would silly on the second problem, so I subtracted the two from each other and was stuck because I thought 300 / 0.3 = 100 💀

Then I was stuck for another 5 minutes

I decided that I shouldn’t be stuck on a problem for too long, so I moved on. But after doing every 5 problems, I was like “it’s impossible that p2 was so hard” and went back to get stuck for another 3 minutes. I felt so desperate when I couldn’t even do problem 2 when I was aiming for DHR, and couldn’t stay calm even though I tried to, until I found out that I solved 16 problems and there was 15 minutes left.

I briefly counted and found that I could only get a 109.5 (without any sillies), and I might really get a lower score than last year. Based on past experiences, I on average had 3 sillies per AMC, so I might not even make AIME 💀

I expected myself to panick even more after realizing this, but perhaps it’s that the problems later were easier, I did 18-22 pretty quickly, and also found my mistake in p2. In the last few minutes, I knew that I didn’t really have time to check my answers, so I only made sure that I didn’t click on the wrong option on the computer.

After

I didn’t really check my answers with others since the digital version scrambled the questions and answer choices so that it’s harder to cheat (and I didn’t notice for a while). I knew I probably got a really bad score, considering that I could easily calculate wrong when I’m nervous. Anyways there’s still a B so hopefully I get a better score on that one :<

===== Above was written before I knew the answers (and scores) =====

So turns out that I didn’t have any sillies, giving me a 136.5 (18 higher than expected). It’s still not a very good score considering people saying that this year’s test was also easy like last year, but enough to make me happy I guess. This is probably my first AMC without sillies, which is ironic as people on AoPS said that this was the most silliable test ever.

My distrib: 11111 11111 11111 11111 11bbb

By this time I’ve also finished taking 10B but I probably won’t write a blog about it because I’m lazy and I did very bad despite it’s much easier than 10A imo.

Hopefully 136.5 is enough to get DHR, MAA didn’t release the statistics this time so I dont really know, sad.

Many people had been posting about their goals for the school year, so I guess I’ll make one too? So here are my goals, the goals in each category are rougly sorted by difficulty

Legend:

• ✔ = successful
• 📈 = currently successful
• ❓ = nothing yet
• 📉 currently failing
• ❌ = already failed

CP (C)

• First Place in LIT Standard Round MS Division ❌
• CF maintain stable 2100+ by end of year ❌
• AtCoder 1900+ ❌
• CF Peak IM ❌

USACO (U)

• Plat ✔
• Plat by december ✔
• Get a positive score on each USACO plat contest ❌
• Camp ✔

Math (M)

• AMC 10 DHR ✔
• Get individual top 50 in something in HMMT November ✔
• Reach level 50 in OTIS ❌
• JMO qual ❌

Other (O)

• Top 500 on CF contribution leaderboard ❌
• GPA 4.0+ ✔
• Stop being lazy ❌
• Socialize ❌

Difficulty order (in my opinion)

C1 < U1 < M1 < C2 < O1 < U2 < M2 < O2 < M3 < U3 < C3 < C4 < M4 < O3 < U4 < O4

I’m new here so idk what math contests they have and their difficulty rlly

Also I’m known for being bad at estimating difficulties of goals (I thought getting into USACO plat was way easier than reaching master on CF 😭)

Hopefully I can complete maybe 10 of the goals, tho everything above C4 seems impossible to me and I’m very good at sillying and being dumb