Tue, 07 Nov 2006
TMOU 8
On Friday and Saturday, we took part in TMOU 8. It was an interesting experience, because it was my first TMOU with snow. In contrast to what some other teams think, my opinion is that snow is not much of a problem - for example heavy rain with temperatures around 0°C could be much worse.
Our performance was similar to the previous years - slow start, good middle part, and a bad end: the first stage took definitely more time than we wanted, and we were somewhere between 20th and 30th place (out of 210 teams). During the first stages of the outdoor part of the game we were even somewhere between 4th and 10th places. But then, at stage 10, we have tried many different approaches, but the solution was pretty simple. It just required to look at the task from a different point of view. The stage 11 was similar - we knew the basic principle, but an inaccuracy on our side prevented us to solve the puzzle soon. We have then finished at stage 13 out of 15 on Saturday noon, on the 22th place according to an unofficial statistics.
I think we have again proved, that even though we may not always find the
solution quickly, we are still able to use a different point of view and
solve the puzzle after some time. However, this year's TMOU did not contain
many interesting puzzles. Most of them only required a lot of work, while
the basic principle could be quessed quickly.
Anyway, here is the description of TMOU 8 as seen by the team coredump.