After waking up at around 12pm today, I pulled up telegram in my phone. The first few messages of this morning were —
Of course, Tasmeem vai had to send this message a bit later –
Okay, back to the contest. At around 7 and a half minutes into the contest, the server received its first submission from the contestant Pranshu Prodipta and it was an AC – the first sign of things working as intended. Funnily enough, members of the National Scientific Committee (NSC) were quite excited to see a submission at ~19 mins that got 11 points in the task "cleaning". At least all those painstaking hours of setting subtasks weren't for nothing! I didn't contribute much (hmmm... if anything at all) to the preliminary contest preparation, but it was exciting for me too – it's the first time for me to be on the other side of the CMS :D
Following the IOI tradition, the tasks were not ordered in the increasing order of difficulty. So the members of the NSC were a bit concered as to whether contestants would be intimidated by only seeing the first task and incorrectly assuming that it was the easiest. Thus, the contestants were sent an announcement suggesting to read all the problems.
Few minutes later, I brought my breakfast(?) to my room to see the competition unfold while eating. Remarkably, there wasn't a single submission from last years' IOI silver medalist, Farhan Ahmad, for about ~77 minutes after his AC of task "cleaning".
In the meantime, (as far as I can remember) Pranshu was dominating in the first half, scooping each and every partial points that he could. Another name that comes to my mind is Adnan Sadik, a former IMO bronze medalist; he would also occasionally take over Pranshu and get the first place. Nafis, a former IOI bronze medalist, on the other hand, was struggling with the task "satchel" quite a bit. The issue with this task was that the memory limit was very tight. Contestants would have to have deep knowledge of their programming language to sqeeze everything into the memory limit. Unfortunately, he couldn't get a 100 at the end in this task despite implementing a correct solution. I imagine few of the other contestants will also be annoyed at the decision of this tight limit. Needless to say, it wouldn't be an appropriate complain because the limit was same for everyone, and in fact, (although only) one contestant – Zarif Rahman – managed to get a 100. Kudos!
There were few other "surprises" for the NSC from the contestants. One notable one was from the contestant Syed Mahmudul Kabir Ratul. He ACed the task "elonmask" at around 2:20 hours into the contest. This was astonishing for us for two reasons: first, we never heard of him before; second, "elonmask" was not a trivial task by any means (I repeat: not at all) and he was the only one who managed to solve it. Although it was a digit dp problem – which itself is a quite niche topic –, it required some additional clever techniques from the folklore. FeelsStrongMan. In fact, we are still wondering why he didn't solve, or at least collected partial points of, the task "satchel".
Another interesting contestant was Safwan Kamal, who scored 47 in "satchel" while somehow managing to score 0 in "cleaning". Actually, you can find this type of contestants almost every year at IOI. For example, performances of Orsolya Lili Janzer at IOI 2018, Valentin Imbach at IOI 2019, and Aditya Jain at IOI 2021 were ridiculous. Unfortunately, I was never cool enough to get such unorthodox performances :) gg
It was also quite amusing for me to see some known faces (names?) perform well. peepoHey.
All in all, there were 1127 submissions in total, 67 non-zero scorers, and 7 venues swarmed with groups of 259 abmitious people. You got a long way to go still. Congratulations to all the people who performed well according to their expectations, especially to the new names on the ranklist. And to those who couldn't perform so well, make sure to reflect on what you did badly and what you could do better – not just in todays contest but throughout the past year. One thing is true for sure, whether it is trivial for you or not, that it takes a lot of practice and patience. It's part of the journey and part of your improvement arc. If you practiced but didn't perform well, there could be two cases: either you didn't practice well enough or your strategy was inefficient (PS: or...). You have to identify and work on those. All these things go for today's winners too! Even if you make it to the IOI team, you have to make sure you are giving your best all the time.
With that, IOI 2022 in Bangladesh has already started. Bring us the goods. Until next time.
*sorry for the grammatical and spelling mistakes