As a senior I went in to TST with an odd combination of emotions. I really wanted to be on the IMO team once, and this was my last chance, but at the same time I had been hoping to run the ELMO and then I later found out that it was traditional for a senior who did not make the team to run it. ``Okay fine, so I have a consolation prize if I don't make it.''
So I was putting pressure on myself to make the team, but at the same time I was trying to convince myself that it didn't really matter. I looked at the people with whom I was competing and realized that it wasn't a guarantee by any means, but I figured I had a good shot. I thought back to what I was told at Romania: ``Once you've already done well you have the confidence to do well again.'' I thought back to my performance at Romania. Better than I really could have asked for. I tried to be confident.
So I went into the TST room on the first day in an entirely confusing state. Pressured but confident but not really confident and darn blue MOPpers are taking the TST again and hmm I didn't do so well on TST last year and I really didn't spend enough time doing problems this year and also the USAMO didn't do much to get me back in practice and I'd be out of practice anyway and okay well I'm nervous except darn there's no adrenaline in my body. Yeah. It turns out that I do better on contests when I'm nervous and get an adrenaline rush.
TST was a flop. Day one went okay. I missed an inequality that plenty of other people got, but at the same time there weren't that many people ahead of me, and even they were only one problem ahead. Nothing insurmountable.
Day two went almost as badly as last year. You see there's an odd characteristic about geometry problems. You can make a lot of progress and not solve the problem. This is because geometric diagrams have a lot of structure in them. So when there's a geometry problem in the first problem slot, I end up working on it and not finding the solution. A little bit in, I think to myself, ``Hmm, I should probably stop working on this geometry problem and try the next problem which is not geometry.'' Within a minute, I'll find something new about the diagram that seems to be useful for the final angle chase in the solution and I think ``Okay, if this doesn't work I'll stop after five more minutes.'' This happened so many times during day two that I really didn't have a chance to look at the other problems. Yet at the end of the day, it went better than it did the year before. This year I spent 3.5 hours on a geometry problem and finished. Last year I did the same thing but didn't finish. 2010 defeats 2009 1-0.
So I went into day three at a rather large disadvantage. The way it had gone I basically needed all three problems on that final day to make the team. I sat down in Avery 106 at 8:00 for the third day in a row and turned over my paper to see a geometry problem as #7 and a binomial coefficient in a number theory number 9. I hate number theory problems about binomial coefficients (although, to be fair this one wasn't bad. I didn't really have a chance to work on it, though). So I killed number 8, then looked at 7 and didn't really get anywhere. When I turned in my papers I was pretty dejected. ``Ah well, no suspense for me.''
The thing is, nothing is ever completely free of suspense. Even when you're the most confident that you won, or the most sure that you didn't, there's a random worry or hope that keeps bugging you until the actual announcement. For that reason I didn't want to be in the blue room when the team got announced. It had nothing to do with who it would be. It was all that I didn't want to have to sit there while the annoying little voice inside of me would say, ``Maybe he'll ignore the TST score.''
Well, I didn't make the team but I did get to run the ELMO. The ELMO is a math olympiad put together by the returning MOPpers and taken by the first time MOPpers. I failed it massively when I was in red mop XD. The ELMO is always called the ELMO, but what the letters stand for is up to the organizers for that year. This year I decided to put as much of the decision making as possible into the hands of the team leaders, including the name and which shortlist problems would appear.
I had been looking forward to the ELMO for a long time and had written several problems before MOP. As soon as I could I posted a sign informing everyone of the first meeting and, following the tradition started last year, signed it Supreme Grand Ayatollah. I've realized in the last year that I enjoy writing contests a lot more than taking them, so I dived into my role as the head of ELMO with a lot of enthusiasm.
The first order of business when running a contest is to get as many problems as you can. It really doesn't matter whether the problems are extraordinarily good or not, since in a collection of 30 problems you'll probably have 6 that are good or can be made good. So I went about soliciting ELMO problems, ending up with 26 on the final shortlist (after the removal of some problems for various reasons). Of course, there were actually only very few sources for problems.
| Name | Problems |
|---|---|
| Brian Hamrick | 8.5 |
| Evan O'Dorney | 4 |
| Carl Lian | 3.5 |
| Others (1 each) | 9 |
Well, that's to be expected. One of the things I found out from this endeavor is that writing problems on command generally produces suboptimal results, similar to writing anything else. Inspiration doesn't come when you sit down and say ``Okay, I'm going to write a problem.'' It comes when it wants to, which makes writing large quantities quite difficult. In the end, only 1.5 of my problems made it onto the ELMO, although I think this was a result of almost all of them filling the same niche rather than problem quality.
In the end, here was ELMO Day 1:
and Day 2:
The problems were written by
- Carl Lian
- Evan O'Dorney
- Mitchell Lee and Benjamin Gunby
- Carl Lian and Brian Hamrick
- Brian Hamrick
- Amol Aggarwal
Overall, I thought the problems were reasonably good, although problem 1 is a rather annoying and not very interesting case bash, and of course I prefer my own combo problems to #3 :-). But anyway, the problems themselves were not too bad this year, but there were lots of traps that were very easy to fall in to (and many people did). So when people left day 1, there were a lot of people saying ``Oh yeah, I solved 1, 2, 3a.'' Very few of them actually got credit for all that. Day 2 was much better in that people basically knew what they solved, but #4 still had a rather large pit that needed to be avoided. Anyway, I'm going to not talk too much about specifics of the problems in case you guys want to try them.
Grading was an interesting, entertaining, and slightly stressful experience, as always.
``Can you tell what this says?''
``How many points is this worth?''
``Do I take off a point for this?''
``Whatever, I'll grade it down and let the team leader coordinate it up.''
This was my second time grading and I've enjoyed it a lot both years, although reading some of the red/green MOPpers' handwriting is pretty annoying. Worst style was not very surprising for me, after seeing the ELMO solutions (don't worry, we did all the grading anonymously. I matched the ID with a name after the grading happened).
After the grading for day 1 was done, we sorted the solutions into 24 folders: one per problem per team and distributed them. Coordination for day 1 would occur during day 2, and the grading for day 2 would be done immediately after with coordination for day 2 happening later that night. Unfortunately, this meant that coordination started at 8 am, so some people missed their coordination time.
Coordination seems like it would be more fun than the grading, but really it's just you arguing for a lower score and the team leader arguing for a higher score. And this almost always involves them pulling some bullshit on you saying that their team member could have done this easily and that they only were missing one tiny step and that the entire problem is trivial so they shouldn't even have to write down anything to get a 7.
The grading and coordination room after everything was complete.In the end, the scores looked good for our efforts. Nobody had as high of a score as we would have liked (the highest being 33 out of a possible 42 by Thomas Swayze), but the medal cutoffs were approximately what one would see at the IMO, and the total number of points given on each problem were in decreasing order on each day, with 1 and 4 being highest and 3 and 6 being lowest. So although plenty of people (including me to some extent) disliked what the problems ended up being, they gave us a good score distribution.
As ELMO finished, so did MOP. Kazakhstan decided to have a ridiculously early IMO, so we ended MOP nearly a full week earlier than we did last year. This meant, among other things, that we had an extremely tight schedule for getting ELMO entirely graded and coordinated. Day 2 was on Sunday, and the departure day was Wednesday. That's how tight it was. Additionally, because so much of my time was spent on the ELMO, I didn't have time to participate in any of the prepared talent show acts. In practice, that meant that I couldn't dance to Gee. =[ I did, however, get to participate in the MathCounts act again, where I was narrowly defeated by David Yang.
After the talent show were superlatives and then MOP awards. In the superlatives, I procured ``best basher'' pretty easily, having managed to get a 7/0.8 for a dumbass solution to an inequality. In the MOP awards, I got recognized for the only times in all four years of being at MOP. First, I got best style in black, which wasn't too surprising considering I had mostly 0.8s and nothing below 0.7 that counted, while many other people had 0.4s on solutions that got 7 math points. For best style, I got a book of sudoku.
Actually I had another MOP first this year. You see, there are a lot of problems to do on the tests, team contests, mock IMO, and so on. So there is a MOP handbook created with all the problems and all the tests. In order to accomplish this, writeups are assigned to the people who did not solve the problem but had some good ideas on it (and in this year's case, to people who solved the problem in a less than beautiful manner). To assist them in writing up the problem, a consultant, who solved the problem in a very elegant fashion, is assigned. This was the first time I got assigned to be a consultant, and I was very happy when I found out In-Sung's test paper said ``You are writing up this problem. Please consult Brian Hamrick, Supreme Grand Ayatollah, and submit to MOP office by Monday.''
Finally the awards for highest MOP score came. Top four from each group were announced. I was pretty sure that I was in the top 5 in black, but I wasn't quite positive. Anyway, when it was black's turn, fourth was Calvin Deng. My heart sank there, since I was thinking that Calvin was ahead of me, but we were very close. I figured In-Sung was probably third then? In any case, I was wrong. With three fewer math points than Calvin, but a very slightly higher mop score, I came in third place :D. For this, I was awarded play money ``to count, because [I] am good at combinatorics.'' Allen was second and Evan was way ahead in first, although not quite as far ahead as Zhai was his senior year.
Overall, MOP was a pretty satisfying end to my math olympiad career. Although I never got to make the IMO team, I've had in total twelve weeks of great experiences and lots of fun at MOP, and I can definitely say that it has helped me improve a lot. Back when I was in red, I knew so little. I did badly on the red tests that I now find easy, I was horrible at writing proofs (I never got above a 0.7 back then, and this year I never got below a 0.7), and all the rest. I was the lucky one of us three seniors this year; Tim and Travis go nowhere near as satisfying a finish.
I'm very happy with what I got, but you know, I still wish I had IMO as well.
