Winter School on Programming, Day 1

I'm starting a series of reports about the days spent at the Winter School on Programming, among students from universities in Ukraine and other countries. I'm in Kharkiv right now and writing these notes from my smartphone, so I apologize for the errors in the text and for some missing letters (in the edited messages I've fixed most of the errors). For those who were expecting a post about the white lion, I'd advise waiting — over the course of the month there may be such an entry, though in a somewhat different format. As before, I'll try to fill the journal with messages that are interesting not only to the author but to the readers as well.

Now about the experience itself and the journey to this competition.

Our team got there by train relatively fine, except for the almost complete lack of light in the carriage, which didn't stop us from starting to make up the beds in Dolynka after 11 in the evening; in the end we fell asleep after midnight. We didn't sleep too well, since it was rather chilly. All in all, we made it fine.

After that we took the metro to KhNURE, where the school is being held, and registered; we did manage to get a place in a comparatively cheap hotel, in a four-person room costing 50 UAH per person, though the heating is very weak and the windows in the room are sealed only with tape, which has peeled off in places from the draft. As a result, even an extra heater doesn't keep a normal temperature, but you can sleep just fine if you're dressed; we'll see what happens when hard frosts set in.

After moving in, we headed to the opening, where we learned the competition format and took part in the draw, which also introduced each team. The opponents look to be fairly strong; some are already familiar from last year's competitions, and the strongest weren't at the opening yet, but most likely they'll be there on the first competition day. Interestingly, our number after the draw matched our hotel room number.

We had dinner after the opening and before the "excursion" around the city, which took place under falling snow. In the end, over an hour and a half, from half past five to seven, we walked from the KhNURE building to the "Sovietska" metro station and the planetarium. Along the way I saw almost no new places, since at the last olympiad in Kharkiv we covered the center fairly well. Interestingly, there was a fire not far from the planetarium — about five fire trucks had gathered, and a block away there was a slightly sharp smell of burning. I should find out what was on fire.

The visit to the planetarium was relatively interesting, since the last time I was at a planetarium was in Dnipropetrovsk at an astronomy conference almost four years ago. Here they showed the starry sky, images of nebulae that you've long been able to find in magazines and on the internet, plus they showed, with commentary, a few clips and an excerpt from a Western film about a three-dimensional map of the universe. Some of the material was interesting, but if you wanted, you could find all of it online. So many were getting drowsy from fatigue after the journey and from the rather dull presentation. But it could have been worse; some of the information was still interesting, and we dried off after the snow.

Then we took the metro back to the hotel, where we had dinner once more and got down to preparing for the competitions. We tried to solve a "joke" problem from the sponsors; we found a solution, but at such an hour it turned out to be hard to fully describe the algorithm, and we'd also reasoned our way to a general case, which complicates the solution, though I don't know whether the problem-setters had that in mind. Plus the problem itself isn't stated quite correctly.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. I'll try to keep up the notes.

Edited 22.02.2008