ACM World Finals Days 1 and 2

We arrived in Stockholm on Saturday, and went straight to the Grand Hotel where we stayed. Despite the jet lagged we managed to get out and see the Nobel (prize) museum which was very interesting. The day ended uneventfully with registration and some food in the hotel.

Sunday started very early with a trip to Vaxholm's fortress at 7:45am.We arrived to see a castle on an island which looked very interesting. If you did not know, Stockholm is on an archipelago.

I was fully expecting a tour of the castle, but instead we were shuffled into an auditorium. We got to listen to IBM talk to us about how they are making the world smarter and saving the world. I guess if you pay for everything you get to give the group a presentation. The presentation was down right terrible. The lecture was a high level view of a bunch of projects that IBM are involved with that are helping save the world. The audience is a bunch of incredibly smart, and very technical people. Tell us about the interesting technical details. One of our coaches remarked is that a good measure of how smart you are is how fast you fell asleep at the lecture.

From there we were divided into groups to do a scavenger hunt. My first thought were math and logic puzzles. It ended up being a bunch of team building type exercises. Games where you have to work together to do something. For example the game pictured on the right. Everyone holds a rope to help control where the ball goes. You need to drop the ball into the cylinders and based on which lights turn on you determine the order of the cylinders. Then you drop the ball into the cylinders in that order for bonus points.

Celestine's team ended up winning the scavenger hunt and winning some well deserved viking hats. We returned to the hotel for a few hours before taking a short walking tour of Stockholm on the way to city hall for the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony recognized a number of volunteers who make this event happen. It must take an immense amount of time to coordinate an event of this side. Just helping make the problem set for our local contest took quite a bit of my time.

The rescheduled TopCoder SRM was during the opening ceremony so ACRush and all the other great TopCoders here missed it. That probably made it a much easier contest than a normal SRM.

In general the first few days were interesting, but a lot of waiting around. I'm really ready to go and start the contest. I'm doing being nervous, lets just get on with it.