Let’s see.
Today is a free day!
We went out to eat at Orient Express. There were like, 12 or 13 of us, at least. Uh, let’s try to list them: JW, KS, VH, AGe, EB, EW, AZ, Turtle, EX, CB, and of course, me.
That list was made solely based on a selfie from the selfies-for-going-off-campus channel from the MOP discord server, so I’m not sure how accurate it is.
We were kind of, well, chaos embodied. We couldn’t decide what to eat, but that’s pretty typical. Then we decided to do takeout (becAuSe ventilation) and bring all the food to Tepper, so we stole fistfuls of single-use chopsticks in order to share food. We also got a bunch of plates and utensils, and then we began asking if we could take all the fortune cookies. 🙂
The cashier was surprisingly willing to put up with our nonsense. He was like, “You can take as many fortune cookies as you can hold, but leave the basket, I need the basket to put the cookies in!” He was such a nice guy!
And the owner was quite nice, too. She was like, “I know you’re poor college students, you should try these dishes, they’re cheap and big.” She spoke mostly in Chinese. I think that was partly my fault though because I started speaking in Chinese to her. Anyway, I’m sure mom would appreciate me practicing Chinese 😝.
Anyway, then, we took all our food to Tepper to eat. We finished most of the food, but we were all absolutely stuffed: the portions there are really huge.
After eating, we played a few games of Fish. During one of the breaks between games, while we were shuffling the cards, I wandered around and saw Po‘s kids playing cards with OS (instructor) and JB (MAA coordinator). His kids are VinL and DiaL, 13 and 8 years old, respectively.
JB had to leave just then, so I was recruited to play with them. It was really fun! We played “Shuttle,” an interesting game that VinL designed.
VinL really likes the word “interesting” and “hmmmmmmm.” “Sus,” too, but to a far lesser extent. DiaL, on the other hand, loves the word “honorable.” She actually only started loving that word when we were playing Shuttle, as she would say, “It’s my turn! What an honor!” every time it was her turn. It was quite honorable. <3
The way the game works is as follows: there’s a 3×3 grid of cards in the middle. Along each side, each player has three cards, and at each of the four corners, there’s another card. There’s also a “shuttle” card, which is just a card you move from one card to the other as play progresses to track where you are. The three cards each player starts with are initially face down. When they first “use” that card they flip it over. They can also use a card that’s face up (so essentially, using a card erases the anonymity of the card but not one’s ability to use it).
The shuttle starts at the card at the very center of the grid. Then, whoever starts the game uses one of their cards. By doing so, they must either add or subtract (in mod 13) the number on their card to the card the shuttle is currently on, and move the shuttle to that new number (the new number must be on the 3×3 grid or one of the four corners). So if the shuttle is at a 5 and the player has a Q, the shuttle either moves to 4 or 6.
There are a couple of cards that you want to move the shuttle to. If you move the shuttle to the corner card to your left, you get to take a card from the deck and it’ll count as one “point” (the card itself doesn’t matter; you don’t ever use the card and it just lies face down in front of you or in your pocket or wherever. It just serves as a counting mechanism for points). If you move the shuttle to the corner card to your right, you get to steal someone else’s card and it’ll count as one “point” (so if someone has a really useful card, you can steal it from them and they won’t be able to use it, though of course, neither will you). (if you move the shuttle to a corner that happens to be adjacent to someone else, it won’t do anything for them because it’s not their turn)
If you move the shuttle to the card in the 3×3 grid directly above one of your cards, you can discard that card and get a new one (face down, so once again anonymous) from the deck.
The game ends when the deck runs out.
The point of the game is to get as many points as you can. (lol, pun entirely intended)
After “Shuttle,” we played some Set and BS (which DiaL calls “Porcupine” because BS is a bad word. She’s saying “Peanut Butter” now as she watches me write this 😝, which is what you say the move after you lied. She said it again! Time of writing: June 17, 10:04 pm).
The BS game went on a LONG time. VinL and DiaL ended up facing up against one another, getting most of the deck, and repeat. While they were doing that, I started balancing DiaL‘s penguin (which was the size of a normal teddy bear) on my head. RW eventually came over to watch the game with us for a while. I delighted in showing her DiaL‘s penguin, Penguan, which squeaks when one squeezes it correctly. She, too, has a squeaky penguin! We proceeded to wander through the groups of card players and squeak the penguins next to their ears. It was terrific fun. I think people became quite annoyed by us (those who even noticed us, anyway), but it was fun.
The Set game was also … interesting. DiaL showed us her version of the game, “Messy Set,” which was essentially throwing the cards on the table topsy-turvy & haphazardly, with no limit on the number of cards on the table. DiaL was the best at the game, then VinL, (then RW when she joined later), then me. As you can tell, the skill level in Set decreases with time.
Or, you know, maybe im just terrible at the game and looking for excuses
After hanging out at Tepper for a bit longer, Mock IMO Coordination began so I went off to that. While we kids had been hanging out in Tepper, the staff had a staff meeting, during which they decided that we can’t go through the window anymore. 🙁
Essentially, we used to just climb through the window to the backyard to go to Po’s story time because Stever doesn’t allow us to open any door beside the front door. However, Po decided that, “no, the window is like a guillotine, you can’t stick your neck through,” so now we have to run around the front and it’s very annoying.
When I got to the MIMO Coordination, it had not started yet. MIMO Coordination is essentially where Po and SR argue for points for the IMO team members from the graders to simulate the conditions of the real IMO for those on the IMO team. This year, RZ decided to coordinate for the returning girls, as well. However, some of the girls had not yet returned to Stever, so they asked me to run off to go fetch them.
As such, I spent a while running back and forth across the parking lot between Stever and Tepper in search of the girls.
The MIMO Coordination itself was interesting. I think someone or other described it as, like, essentially a spectacle where the Coordinators argue with the graders until the students randomly got good partials.
The whole time RZ was arguing for points for the girls, she was saying such things as “it’s the moral way of solving the problem” (her way of saying the students were on the right track) and “this rubric is horrible” (she complained about the rubric so many times!).
Also, a few of us (DerL, Turtle, one or two others, and I) crouched down under four or five umbrellas to form an umbrella turtle. It was an entirely productive and wonderful use of our time.
After MIMO was dinner.
Dinner at Resnik is sometimes a tad sad. Like, the hot buffet isn’t superb. If the fruit had been good then I would be mostly happy, and most of the time, the fruit is good. But sometimes, it’s, like, a bit rotten.
Anyway.
After dinner, I went to the YL‘s seminar. It was really chill: essentially, we got a bunch of blankets on the ground and just sprawled out in the backyard (all the seminars and singing troupes and Po‘s storytimes are held in the backyard to prevent COVID-19) as we listened to him. The topic was about min cut max flow, which is essentially where you consider a (weighted) directed graph as a sort of pipe system and figure out how much water can go through it. YL was working on an algorithm for finding the max flow. Old algorithms used to be just looking for paths in the graph, but that was really slow. New algorithms focus on using matrices or something and multiplying them (? I don’t really remember, i’m writing this on June 19, but I understood it during the class!), which have brought the speed to ~O(n1.5). It had since advanced to something like n10/7, which is really, really ugly.
And then Yang and his team brought it down to O(n1+ε), where ε approaches 0. Like, wow! That’s like, basically approaching O(n)!!!! Link of his paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.00671.pdf
Apparently, that paper had gotten an article in some really good journal or other, and Po had even read that article and been impressed, but he didn’t know YL was involved!
YL used Jamboard to give the talk (using Franklyn’s iPad, a TA who has not yet been cleared). My phone was running out of battery (10-20%), so JC quite kindly offered to let me share his phone for the Jamboard. While we were watching the Jamboard, LR sent JC the message (or something along these lines), “If I die in mafia, it was ES.”
Later, ES did, in fact, kill LR. As such, being mafia, I informed the other mafia that JC may suspect ES, causing the other mafia to kill JC in the game. Thus, I indirectly caused JC‘s death in the game.
JC decided to dm me on discord due to that, resulting in us becoming friends!
Anyway.
After YL’s seminar, I did singing troupe.
Po’s storytime today was about imposter syndrome. He talked about how he always got into situations where he thought everyone around him was better than him: when he went to MOP, when he got into IMO, and when he became a professor at CMU. Even though he didn’t think he was as good as others, he said that just being a nice guy is the best thing you can really do.
Then, he discussed being a Ph.D. student. On one hand, it was good because his Ph.D. advisor was really good. But on the other hand, that meant a lot of really good people wanted to study under his Ph.D. advisor, so the two other Ph.D. students with his advisor were really good. Like, he said that Student A was so good he had so many research papers under his belt from undergrad that he looked like a Ph.D. student and surpassed everybody, while Student B knew everything and surpassed everyone but Student A. One of them apparently said, “If you want to know what someone’s good at, look at what they’re thinking about in the shower.” The other said something similar about not wanting to drive because then he’ll crash into something by thinking about a theorem.
Po continued on to talk about starting out as a CMU professor. Apparently, the first day he walked into class, everyone thought he was a student, too (believable, considering multiple times, RG (I think) has confused Po for a student at the camp. He’s almost 40). Apparently, he ran into JM at some point and, as they’re talking, brings up the idea of doing some sort of scholarship program (possibly specifically for math students). Essentially, Caltech or somewhere used to have such a scholarship program, but then they canceled it that year, so now Po suggested picking that up and doing it themselves. JM was like, that’s an amazing idea! So he picked up the phone and dialed up the President of CMU!!!!
Like!
Like, wow!
Get this, usually, these things have to go through a whole ladder, right, up to their superiors to their superiors to their superiors to the President. But John Mackey just directly dialed him!
And he got through, too, because he was friends with the man’s secretary!
Anyway, so the President was like, that’s a good idea, I’ll come down to your office (this never happens! It’s always people go to the President, not vice versa!) and we’ll talk about it.
And so they talked, and the President got them some millions of dollars, and that’s how the whole thing ended up happening.