10 Days in the IOI Training Camp (IOITC) At CMI, Chennai

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10 Days in the IOI Training Camp


What it is ... 

The IOITC or the IOI Training Camp in India is the final level of selection for the Indian team of the IOI. Only the top 4 in the final rank list are selected. The difficulty level of the IOITC is considerably harder than INOI. Although most people presumably study more than the prescribed by the official webpage, but still... one can qualify in the national round with just basic knowledge of graph theory like BFS and DFS , a little DP and a spoonful of logic.

However, in this blog, I will mostly relate my experience in this year's IOITC17.

Here Goes .... 

So this year I was selected for the IOITC. Being in class 9, I was the youngest this year. Even after giving INOI, I knew I would probably would... I had been able to solve both the problems, so it was not much of a surprise when the mail came with the official result. However, this year, a lot of class 10 students were allowed :  the cutoff for below class 11 was a mere 100, while for classes 11 and 12, it was 150. Normally this is not the case, but this year as Madhavan sir explained, they did this on the basis that if younger students went, they would have a better chance at the next IOI's.

Anyway, this year it was held in he first week of May, from 30th April to 10th May.

For me, it meant two things... firstly I would be able to skip school for a whole lot of days... yay! ...and  secondly that it was going to be my first trip alone.

As for my preparation for the Camp requires a whole other blog.
Here, I will just discuss what happened at the camp.

First few days....

The first couple of days mostly were just getting to know the other students. Ehh.. well... when I say mostly... I mean a bit really. Most of the time we spent in the lecture hall and the lab adjacent to it.

On the first day, we were given lectures on combinatorial geometry and DP optimization techniques, including convex hull trick, divide and conquer technique and Knuth's optimization.

In the next 4 or 5 days we had an option to either attend the practice test or the lecture sessions. This was during the afternoon session , extending from 9-2 pm. After that was mostly lectures on different topics. This year, Rajat was also a faculty, so problem discussion time was very little... he could explain the problems in very little time. Another thing was that he never gives the full solution -- u still have to think a bit, especially on the implementation part sometimes, to actually submit an AC solution. On the other hand was Tanuj Khattar. He would normally explain the topics in much greater details.

To sum up all the lectures, they were one of the few times where I actually had to work to understand all the concepts. Of course along with the problems!


You would assume that after all this we would be tired. And I did not even mention that we sometimes used to play badminton or football in the evenings.Guess I did now..
But maybe because of the environment, maybe because of something else, we still had the energy to stay up till 2AM in the night and code.

The main difference between coding alone and coding in a good environment is just that -- the environment!
Most of them are very helpful and problem discussion always helps. Moreover, you can always ask someone better than you to show how to code up a certain solution. And you can be sure they will.

As for the quality of the problems, all I can say is that they are tough. Nothing more, nothing less. Also, this year, there was more of geometry problems involved, and data structure problems were less. Greedy also seemed a favourite this year. 





The rest will be in a blog of its own...happy reading!




 



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