ICPC World Finals 2007 Day 3, Practice sessions, Japanese Cultural Experience, and CyberCafe

Today is the opening ceremony of the ACM ICPC 2007 World Final followed by two Practice Sessions. In the afternoon, we can try Japanese Cultural Experince (Shodo, Zazen, Origami, Aikido, Anime) and come ango for the CyberCafe.

One by one, the teams went into this room.

This is our seat. The camera crew took pictures of every team for tomorrow's contest.
The picture at the right will be shown (tomorrow) if we solved a problem

The ACM ICPC World Final is officially opened by Shingo Takada, the ACM ICPC 2007 World Final Contest Director

One by one, the board of ACM ICPC gave Greetings. The board consists of ACM Japan Chapter,
IBM Tokyo Research Lab, ACM, ICPC, IBM Executive Sponsor, UPE, World Finals Director,
Minister of State for Innovation, and IPSJ.

There were two performances during the Greetings:
The left is the Japan traditional dance for motivation
The right is the Japan traditional "Guitar" music which has unique sound

Bill Poucher, the Executive Director of ACM ICPC, gave awards to the board and volunteers for making this event successful
Then the Practice Session 1 begins

The Chief Judge answered the Question and Answer session after Practice Session 1 was over.
There were interesting announcements: Some of the teams try to hack the network/system,
also some of the teams were kicked off the practice session standings.
(Ini ada kejadian lucu: waktu kita di Taiwan, kan practice sessionnya gak dibatesin jumlah submission
jadi kita bisa submit ke 9 problems dan AC semua, otomatis kita jadi nomor 1 di practice session standings.
Nah, Lacotix keliatannya gak mau kalah lagi seperti di practice session Taiwan waktu itu, jadi mereka submit
sebanyak2nya ke semua problems. Tapi di World Final practice script hanya memperbolehkan submit ke salah satu problem!
Alhasil si Lacotix ditendang dari Standings \LOL)

Practice Session 2 continued after the Question and Answer Session
All teams left their Team Notebooks for inspection

The rest of the afternoon, there were Japanese Cultural Experience (Shodo, Zazen, Origami, Aikido, Anime)

A little description about the Japanese Cultural Experience:

• Shodo (Japanese Calligraphy), this showed us how to write the characters. One can tell the spirit/emotion of the writer just by looking at the writing. At the end, we were allowed to write our own and take home the writing as souvenirs.
• Zazen (Meditation), this is where you enter the "State of Nothingness". It's to empty your mind, hoping that new ideas can come up.
• Anime (Graphic arts), I only took a quick look for this so I can't tell much about it.
• Aikido (Self Defense Martial Arts), two kinds of moves were demonstrated and practiced in this experience. One is when you were caught from the back, and second is when your arm was caught. The moves show how to escape after get caught.
• Origami (Paper folding), this tells you how to fold paper into some kind of form (birds, mountains, person, tea cup, etc... see the picture above).

I tried the Aikido, Zazen, Anime (at a glance), and Shodo. So I learned a bit how to escape, how to enter the "State of Nothingness" and how to write characters.

While waiting for Zazen (Meditation), I played chess with Kurniady :)
Then we have dinner at the Hotel

After dinner we went to CyberCafe to continue the second round with Kurniady
Then with Andoko. (hati2 ama mulut berbisanya Andoko, jangan sampe terhanyut, pasti kalah)
(Waktu maen ama ndok banyak banget undo nya \LOL)

Next : Day 4, ACM-ICPC World Final Contest, Awards ceremony, and Surprise event (March 15, 2007)

Back to : Day 2, IBM Tech Trek presentations and excursion to Disney Sea (March 13, 2007)