Pancakes and How to make your teammates squirm for 50 minutes...

Waking up late once again (I seem to see a little bit of a trend :S) we hurried down to breakfast to order the famed Perouse Lodge ricotta pancakes which "really get the heart beating (/palpitating/stopping)" topped with berry compote and ice cream. This is a time to remember all my friends who would be bustling to school while I indulge myself (moral of the story: do informatics; we have the best breakfasts!)...

The business part day started with a slightly easier trial exam than those previous, but still was not without its difficulties. This was followed by a free afternoon during which Goldy ran off to laser tag, and the rest of us were stuck in a computer lab for the better part of 5 hours. A suggestion of a 5-hour-long blogging marathon was (evidently) rejected due to the ever growing fear of RSI. Instead, we resorted to the (evidently anti-RSI) activity of TypeRacer for the majority of the time.

Following dinner and the return of Goldy, we settled down for the nightly session of Contact where it took Nic, Goldy and GP over 50 minutes to figure out 'precipitation', being repeatedly frustrated due to their belief that it clearly was not a word. Yet another exam follows tomorrow and it shall be tough... as nails. We must be tougher!

Cross Products and Even Crosser Informaticians

Today, the four students, as well as the two tutors, collectively proved a greedy algorithm for a computational geometry problem. We then individually wrote several hundred horrific lines of code to solve the problem, before realising our proof was wrong. It still scored 70% on orac though, so I think of this as being 70% completely and utterly correct. Proof by test data? Such is informatics.