Stanford Math Tournament

A week after HMMT, AAST was scheduled to fly to Palo Alto Friday afternoon to compete at the Stanford Math Tournament. [Un]fortunately, we were hit with a small blizzard again, which resulted in the cancellation of our departure flight, so we had to catch the next flight available, which was on Saturday. We were all sad that we no longer had a day of touring, but were grateful that we still could go. So on Friday night (or on Saturday morning ten minutes before leaving the house if you're Sam :P), we all packed our luggage and anxiously waited for the start of our 3000 mile trek.


Everyone congregated in front of the school gym at Saturday noon, just as Dr. Mayers had ordered. People who didn't go to HMMT picked up t-shirts and hoodies. After Dr. Galitskiy took attendance, we loaded one of the buses with luggage, boarded the other two buses, and were on our way to the airport (EWR). In particular, I brought my DSLR, iPhone, and iPod video (must save iPhone battery life xD) and left my laptop at home.


Upon arriving at the airport, we checked in baggage (fortunately I didn't have to ^_^), got boarding passes, and went through security. Dr. Mayers ordered us to stick with our team leaders (Mu A's was Dr. Nevard). We ended up waiting for Alex most of the time xD He got reinspected by the TSA guards and failed at tying his shoes after he cleared security xD We headed to the gate and grabbed some food (in my case, a box of incredibly expensive sushi <_<). When most of us got back from nomming (to use Jenny's word), Sam and I watched some of Alex Kim's epic card tricks while Mark handed out Alex Zhu's mock AIME for the pro-er people to do during the flight. We then boarded the plane after about an hour and a half.


Upon finding my seat and sitting down  at a window seat in a row with a middle aged American man and a single British woman (who kept insisting that we drive on the wrong side of the road), I listened to music on my iPod and worked on the mock AIME. I solved a couple of problems before dinner came. We had a chicken enchilada wrap, a side salad, a brownie, and a bag of fresh baby carrots. Unable to just eat, I played some Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle as I nommed.


After dinner, I resumed working on the AIME, only to discover my lurking airsickness x_x. I tried to sleep, bit I didn't have anything soft on which to lean :( Then I played bricks on my iPod video for the lulz and got a new high score :D (477) Apparently near the end, the AI launches more balls at once and sneakily shortens the paddle ._.


For the remainder of the flight I prefolded some origami cranes. I was quite surprised that by the time I had finished my sixth crane, the flight was in its last half hour!


Unfortunately claiming baggage didn't go that well. Nearly the entire Mu F lost their luggage xDD We waited on the bus for quite a bit until they came, and then left for the hotel. When we arrived, Dr. Mayers ordered lots of pizza boxes. Yes, pizza at 0100 EST. After eating pizza and watching a game of Catan, Matt showed up from Caltech and wanted to play some games of bridge. We were able to fit in five hands. On the second one I got a zero point hand, and on another I got to use the 2C opener, which scared everyone xD Then we went to sleep.


Sunday was the day of the competition, but unfortunately I didn't sleep well :( During the team and power rounds, I was trying to wake up while everyone else scolded themselves for forgetting about Ramsey numbers, but we did pretty well anyway. Then came the individual rounds. We all made a bunch of silly mistakes, but weren't as fail as David Yang, who forgot to hand in his Calculus answer sheet XFD Alex and Sam qualified for Algebra tiebreakers (three people got perfects), but got second and third respectively because they were slow/made dumb mistakes :( Anyway, we got first overall, somehow XD Maybe our hive mind is just that pwnage :D


After the competition, Dr. Nevard showed us the gates of hell, a famous work by some renowned person. Then we walked back to the hotel to get dinner. Purchase Cellophane and some other people went with Dr. Nevard to get some delicious burgers at Kirk's Steakburgers (*gasp* I chose burgers over sushi :O). As usual, I had a Swiss burger, which was super nommy :D When we got back to the hotel, I watched a bit of Starcraft, Catan, and finally went to sleep at 2230 PST.


Monday was the day of departure. We arrived to the airport pretty early, so people settled in their Starcraft, bridge, and Catan formations. We boarded fifteen minutes later due to a small failure with the aircraft. Then we got on the plane, got served a small chicken wrap for lunch, and made it home without many problems. Yayyy


This blog post was drafted on an iPhone. :)

Harvard-MIT Math Tournament 2010!

This weekend was the XIIIth annual Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament! Perhaps the second biggest and second most important competition, all the teams basically just did math the months of January and first half of February to test their skills. Noticing that our team was beast as a whole but lacking individual-wise, Mark-san implemented Operation PICTURE (Pwning Individual Competitions Through Ubiquitously Rigorous Exercise (jeebus, how did i memorize that XD (and yay for the nested parentheses!))) to try to bolster our individual scores. Practice time faded into the past as February 20th rolled around.

This fateful morning, I woke up at 0630. Unable to fall back asleep, I laid in bed until 0715, when my alarm rang. I got dressed in our super special awesome math team apparel (collared t-shirt + sweater) and did some fifteen odd sit-ups and five pushups as preparation. Then I went downstairs, had a bowl of cereal, and left for Harvard.

The car ride was definitely not the smoothest trip. Driven by a PhD, copiloted by another PhD, and directed by a fail GPS, we somehow got lost twice (by lost I mean passed by MIT's Lobby 7 twice :S). Fortunately, after a fifty minute journey (which was twenty minutes too long), I headed into the Science Center to wait for the rest of AAST. Upon entering the building and walking down the hallway, I spotted Brian talking to some of his friends. Unfortunately for him, once I had found a nice spot to stand, I faced the exit to look for the rest of my team. 

Not long after I saw Dr. Nevard coming in, with everyone else not far behind. I greeted everyone and made sure everyone was OK (especially Mike Sun and JP). Thirsty, I went to get a drink, but was chased by one of my Exeter friends. It was quite trivial to lose her, and I eventually got a refreshing cup of orange juice and rejoined the team. 

By this time everyone was heading off to their testing rooms, and I went with Mike Tan to Calc/Combo + Geo room. The tests weren't so bad, but unfortunately I made some silly mistakes and lost a handful of points. On one of the geometry problems, I did find a really nice solution, but got it wrong because I forgot to multiply by a constant (the \sqrt{2}/2 in the end) -.-

Problem 6: Three unit circles, w_1, w_2, and w_3 in the plane have the property that each circle passes through the centers of the other two. A square S surrounds the three circles in such a way that each of its four sides is tangent to at least one of w_1, w_2 and w_3. Find the side length of the square S.

Solution: Let $P$, $Q$, and $R$ be the centers of $\omega_1$, $\omega_2$, and $\omega_3$, respectively. Notice that the diagonal of $S$ has to pass through one of the centers (let's say $P$) and the intersection of $\omega_2$ and $\omega_3$ only. Now we will compute the length of $AC$. We know that $AC = AP + PS + SC$. $AP = \sqrt{2}$, $PS = PT - ST = \frac{\sqrt{3}}{2} - \frac12$, and $SC = \sqrt2 (\frac{\sqrt2}{2} + 1) = 1 + \sqrt2$. Therefore, the side length of $S = AC\frac{\sqrt2}{2} = \frac{\sqrt2}{2}(\sqrt2 + \frac{\sqrt3 - 1}{2} + 1 + \sqrt2) = \frac{\sqrt2}{2}(2\sqrt2 + \frac{\sqrt3}{2} + \frac12) = 2 + \frac{\sqrt6}{4} + \frac{\sqrt2}{4} = \frac{8 + \sqrt6 + \sqrt2}{4}$. No $\cos 15^o$ crap required! :D

It turned out that I wasn't that much of a failure, as other people on Mu A told me that they also got murdered when we regrouped to go to Sever for the team round. 

The team round was equally as rape as the individuals. We only answered five questions (1,2,3,4,6 and wrote a joke for 10). I was somewhat disappointed that I didn't get the only geometry problem (some weird angle chasing stuff), but having realized that it requires some esoteric olympiad geometry knowledge, I didn't feel that bad. After that was over, a hungry Pavel and Sam ran away to somewhere to eat lunch and Mark and I headed to where TJ was eating lunch while the rest of the team decided on sandwiches and pizza.

Jenny graciously waited for us at the entrance and led us to TJ's little ``hideout.'' She then forced me to eat a pizza, which obviously scared off Mark as he [actually both of us] felt really bad for taking other teams' food. Then Harini came and hung out with us for a while…and it was slightly awkward. XD She dragged us to see some Exeter people, but on my way, I met Jacob Hurwitz and he recognized me XD That was pretty amusing. After Harini left, Jenny dragged us to play Gluck, but I stubbornly refused a countless number of times >D I eventually led them back to where we started and saw some AAST people filtering in, including Sam and John. I started a bridge game with them and Brian. Then a bunch of people gathered around us to watch, but eventually got bored because John played really slowly, as always. Some people wanted to go to minievents, but my parents didn't let them, which was pretty retarded. Taking charge, I dispersed everyone and told them to report to the Guts room by 2:30. 

When I got to Science Center B, there was a huuuuuuge crowd waiting outside. I shoved my way through to join Mark and Pavel, who were at the front. The door opened soon after and we all walked or got shoved in, one way or another. Mu A sat in formation, took out scrap paper, and waited for Mark to retrieve the first packet. Occasionally, I reported our performance, but made sure I didn't get too fixated. The eighty minutes flew, and by the end, we emerged victorious by a slim thirteen points!

The eight of us got up and mingled with other people while the HMMT staff were preparing the awards ceremony. Mark, Pavel, and I went to talk with Mu C and the Lehigh people. Then I went back up to sit with the bulk of the team. By this time, the awards preparation was complete and everyone quieted down.

In the individuals, Mark and Sam had honorable mentions in calculus. John got second in combo and placed tenth overall. Brian didn't win any of his tests, which probably was a letdown :( Then was the team round award. Mu A tied with Beijing STFX for second, which warranted a game of rock-paper-scissors. Excited, Mark walked down to the ``stage'' and put on a small show for all of us :) Although he won, he had to surrender his plaque to China because HMMT does not want to pay shipping to Beijing XD Next was Guts. Happy again, Mark skipped down, retrieved the translucent triangular prism, and put on another little show ^^ He set the trophy down by his feet when he got back, but that turned out not to be the best idea as Alex Zhu almost stabbed himself with it XDD

Finally was the sweepstakes. Everyone was so hyped up for this. The bottom five were pretty obvious; but everyone was super duperly focused on the top five. After 3rd to 5th places were announced, both AAST and TJ were superly anxious beyond belief. Then the announcer opened his mouth and said ``In second, with one thousand four hundred sixty-six points, which is just three points behind first place, with one thousand four hundred sixty-nine points, we have, Thomas Jefferson A!!!!'' We all cheered as TJ A went up and claimed their frisbees and octagon. At this point, Mark and everyone was getting super jumpy. Then Winston finally called us up and we all ran down! Mark, being a true actor, asked to say a few words while the rest of the team got frisbees. I took center stage and held our nice octagon :D Unfortunately, Mark was unable to contain his exuberance and made a comment that many people took seriously. I don't blame them; the comment was certainly ill-timed, but the way Mark said it indicated that it was completely for jest. Actually I will stop talking about this now because it seems highly redundant when there is lots of coverage already:
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=333745
http://thebeastlyhoodlum.blogspot.com/2010/02/sexism-vmt-and-hmmt.html#comments

After that, we all gathered our stuff and headed to the buses and I said goodbye as people boarded.

Dinner was pretty tricky. Brian wanted me to eat dinner with him and Jenny at Harvard Square after they finished with the tour. Unfortunately, their tour finished an hour after I headed to Harvard Square, so I unbored myself by flipping through some magazines in the little newspaper shop. Finally, around 1900, I spot them at a T [bus] stop. We decided to eat at Qdoba (a restaurant like Chipotle) after a bit of indecisiveness.

Upon finishing dinner, we wandered around Harvard Square, first stopping at the Coop only to be deterred by the clerk when she saw Jenny open her can of Milkis. She wanted to drink it after being unable to decide whether to buy a $4.25 slice of chocolate cheesecake, a $2.50 cupcake, or nothing at all out of fear of getting fat XD

Then we wandered to CVS because Jenny wanted to buy some chocolate. She claimed that she was buying them for me, so she could then eat some of it and not be guilty XD We found the chocolate selection and again stood there for about ten minutes before deciding on a bar of Ghirardelli dark chocolate. After she paid for it, we found a bench outside to sit down and eat it. However, I could only stay for ten more minutes because my parents wanted to leave D: At 20:30 I said goodbye to both, joined my parents, and went home.

The Good:

• Teamwork prevails
• Collared t-shirts just in time
• Rape tests even the playing field
• Awesome little afterparty
• Happy ending x2

The Bad:

• Not enough time
• No quiet places relatively near Science Center 
• I failed the rape tests
• Pizza for lunch
• Nearly everyone got sick, one way or another

The Ugly:

• ``Thank you for coming and uhh…losing to us.'' -- Mark Lipa Velednitsky

Apple unveils…the iPad!

Today, I read the engadget liveblog of the iPad during a firedrill. MLIA

2009: In Review

Five influential/important/wintastic things that happened to me in 2009 (in chronological order):

• I get infected by IM disease :O
• YNABC (bridge championships) at Wash DC~
• USACO Gold (but i'm getting completely owned XD)
• The Second PUMaC 2009
• I GET INTO COLLEGE THAT I WANT TO ATTEND

What does your list look like?

SSD Impressions!

So for Christmas, I bought myself a very nice present!

It's real!

Well actually it wasn't totally superfluous. The week before vacation, my laptop's hard drive decided to suicide IN DATA STRUCTURES (when I booted the computer, it would try to install some random firmware update. :S), so I was left with a brick. Not fun. >:[ Well thankfully, I had a nice Time Machine backup, so I didn't worry that much. Anyway, I decided to install this little bugger immediately after I got back from my Boston vacation to see if my HDD was indeedly at fault. It turns out that it was and I now have a working laptop! In fact, I'm typing this entry on it :)

Here are some impressions (these are estimates; I was too lazy to use a stopwatch):

• Mac OS X Snow Leopard install from iPod takes about 10min vs. 20min for HDD
• Boots in 15s and shuts down in 5s. Dammnn!! O_O
• Sleep (includes writing RAM image to disk) takes about 3s instead of 10s. 
• Projected battery life with WiFi enabled is now 4 hours (33% increase!!)
• Palm rest area above disk is no longer toasty after disk intensive operations

Here is some Xbench vomit for Mac geeks and benchmark junkies (performance relative to a ~6 year old Power Mac G5 with 7200RPM disk):

Disk Test 218.97

Sequential 139.23

Uncached Write 144.06 88.45 MB/sec   [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 132.67 75.06 MB/sec   [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 98.07 28.70 MB/sec   [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 246.74 124.01 MB/sec  [256K blocks]

Random 512.48

Uncached Write 593.22 62.80 MB/sec   [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 252.59 80.86 MB/sec   [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 1921.97 13.62 MB/sec   [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 609.71 113.14 MB/sec  [256K blocks]

Some more system info (specs are pretty lame for 2009, but plenty usable!):

  MacBook Pro 1,1 (Early 2006)
    Intel Core Duo ``Yonah'' 2.0GHz 2MB 667MHz
    2048MB DDR2 667MHz RAM
    INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC MLC 160GB
    ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 (downclocked)

It increased my composite Xbench score from a ~50 to 115.87. This is pretty win.

Successed!

Oh hello.

Guess what?

 for mwa =D

and five of my friends, who all happened to have made one olympiad or another. Let's see:

me - USACO Gold

Kamran - USACO Gold

Pavel - USAMO, NACLO

Ian - USAMO x4, USNCO, NACLO

Mark - USAMO x2, Red Mop

Sam - USAMO x3, Red Mop, USACO Gold, USAICO (camp)

…and for reference:

Brian Hamrick - USAMO x3, USAMO Honorable Mention x2, Red Mop, Blue Mop, Black Mop, USAPhO x2, NACLO x2, USACO Gold, USAICO x2, IOI x2

Wow. That's a lot of olympiads. But olympiads aren't everything. Let's see what else we have:

me - Math Team [deputy] captain, Compsci Team Founder, only high school female in USACO Gold this year, ACSL stuff, bridge stuff

Kamran - ACSL stuff, $40/hr job (i honestly don't know what else he does >_>)

Pavel - works on lots of open source software projects, chem research, psych research

Ian - quizbowl, chem research, student council

Mark - Math Team captain, psych research

Sam - he's SAM THE FINGERET

Also, all of us happened to be on either the school's 2009 ACSL flagship team or the winning 2008 iTest team, Purchase Cellophane (Mark-sempai named it xD)

me - ACSL, Purchase Cellophane
Kamran - ACSL
Pavel - Purchase Cellophane
Ian - Purchase Cellophane
Mark - Purchase Cellophane
Sam - ACSL, Purchase Cellophane

[Aside: If you need extra practice in set theory, solve the following questions. Otherwise, skip this block of italics.]
1.
2.
3.
4.

Also x2: Everyone but me had 1500+ SAT (CR+M) [lol i'm a fail, but it's okay]. (that also proves that SATs AREN'T EVERYTHING. ASIAN PARENTS TAKE NOTE!) Everyone had triple 800 in SAT II's: Math 2, Physics, and Chemistry.

So yeah. None of the people who didn't make any olympiad were deferred, and one physics olympiad semifinalist was rejected (though he didn't have such a great GPA). Who knows what Admissions was thinking? Hmm.

Anyway Mr. Holbrook was super pleased with our results, since all of us were on math team. Yes, this is going to be massive bragging fodder for him, but oh well! We need to motivate the [failing] froshies to get better somehow. (cues propaganda "IF YOU'RE NOT ON MATH TEAM [*cough* Mu A or Mu B], YOU HAVE NO CHANCE OF GETTING INTO MIT! ALSO, SATs AREN'T EVERYTHING SO DO MORE MATH EVERY DAY!") [A/N: this only holds this year] Maybe more people [girls] will come to me to train. It'd be nice to have a successor follow the same footsteps as I did. =]

I hope this has been a somewhat informative post for those of you underclassmen who want advice for getting into MIT and other top colleges. I'll probably post more about stuffs that I did in the near future. Stay tuned! =]

(title comes from http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Successed!.aspx)

End of School/Picture Dump :O

Today was indeedly the last day of trimester, and school, to an extent. It's also the end to Classical French Cuisine, which I'm going to miss dearly. Anyway, to preserve those moments of pure win and epic fail, I took pictures! (seems so OOC for me XD) Without further ado, here they are:

Left 4 Dead in Data Structures

What's wrong?

Our Sun Fire! with dual 750GB goodness!

Sun Fire internals. It's a single proc AMD with 4x512MB RAM

Looking at our motherboard for a science fair in Data Structures. o_O

ZOMG our circuit board etcher that no one knows how to use (except for George Hotz, ofc) XDD

Assembly-lining the BCA Math Competition 5th Grade grading room. It went fast, but they didn’t catch the boo-boo in the answer key. =[

My awesomely awesome answer key that sped everything up by a factor of 2 :D

The crapload of butter left over from the math competition. Anyone want one? =]

Unnecessarily short ethernet cable amid our ghetto LAN setup for Hadoop XD

Julia's vomiting pumpkin

The Fall Play, in which Mark-sempai performed!

Unnecessary celebration of Duke victory that covered our lockers.

LED sign fail (part 1). The people put it up after we won Duke. Well not me, but Mu A. Apparently the people felt like spoiling our victory, so they inserted a boo-boo…

LED sign fail (part 2)

Watching Pokémon during internship lunch break :D

Internship setup. Note the unnecessarily large object on the table. Some dumbass sat on my colleague's laptop, which cracked the screen, so he has to use an external screen XD

They give me a screen, I use it! XD It's a Dell Ultrasharp 2009WFP, btw. (the one that uses the sucky TN panel D:)

Same thing in the engineering room. This time I'm using a dual screen setup connected to a Dell Ultrasharp 2209WFP (another sucky TN panel monitor D:)

The computers in the engineering room. Each has a 2GHz QC Xeon, 4GB RAM, and 160GB HDD

Cupcake man in the school parking lot? WTF?! o_O

Typical day in physics. Yes, Kamran is riding on top of Fahmid.

Today, I was more or less done with the assignment at internship, so I downloaded and dd'd (UNIX clone tool) Chrome OS onto my 4GB flash drive. The dd took so long that I was able to walk across the school with my laptop open and sit down for another 15 min. Then, when my friend let me boot it, we discovered that we needed a working internet connection to log in. And we couldn't get that unless we got a web browser. School internet FTL D:

While I was in the parking lot searching for my bus, I saw a car with a weird sticker on the lower right  of the windshield. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the stick was a ``failed inspection'' sticker. And this was my first time seeing one XD

And this concludes first trimester. I'll upload the pictures of the food later. Stay tuned =]

Math Prize

For now, I just have the questions uploaded. Maybe I'll actually blog about it when I'm not busy.

Some stats:

HM I: 9 points

HM II: 10 points

8th - 12th ($600): 11 points

5th - 7th ($1000): 12 points <-- me

2nd - 4th ($6000): 13 points

1st ($20000 -- 10 MacBook Airs!!!! [see end of post]): 14 points

EDIT 1: yay trophy ^_^ daamn the text on the bottom is not clear at all =[ it weigh more than my computer O_O (aka more than 5.25lbs)

EDIT 2: giant check that i can't use

Problems:

Tiebreak problems:

Problem 1:


Problem 2:



10 MacBook Airs: Because I knew that there would be massive death at the competition (especially since the china girls math olympians are going), as a joke I said that if I got first, I would buy TEN MacBook Airs (at the newly-opened Broadway Apple store :D) with the money. Of course it didn't happen, but I was indeedly surprised that I got 6th.

Anyway, here is what 10 MacBook Airs looks like: