Calculus or real people?

At 2:30 pm, I walked out of MIT Mental Health gently cradling my medication. It had just struck midnight in India, bringing with it the arbitrary auspices of my birthday. I didn’t see what was so special about looking at age modulo solar revolutions, but I reminded myself to call my parents, as they would be expecting it.

The sun beamed brightly on East Campus, draping even the ugly black sculpture in an aura of bearability. Amidst the sea of happy faces, I saw the one I had gone to great lengths to avoid these past few days. I peered into my prescription, became engrossed in reading the fine print, and let my legs take me out of sight.

No one could be this special – population numbers and the Pigeon-Hole Principle could prove this – but my mind would not listen to reason. I wished I could go back to a simpler time- when I only cared for mathematical abstractions. But the branched Riemann surfaces, Markov chains and quantum harmonic oscillators that awaited me no longer seemed appealing.

MIT is fun and exciting, but it is also hard. I feel torn between two orthogonal pursuits- the perfect, geometric world of mathematics and  and the chaotic, asymmetric realm of interpersonal relationships. Chase either of these roads too far, and I crave the comfort of being on the other one. Attempt to tread both, and I find myself losing sight of my goals on each. The code becomes hacky, the sex becomes meaningless, the problem sets done only for the sake of completion, and the drugs done only for temporary respite.

And at this point in the semester this oscillation had begun to take its toll on me. I had failed a personal relationship I cared about, and had stagnated academically- having lost interest in many of the exciting things I wanted to learn at the beginning of spring. I wondered if my priorities were fucked up, and if pursuing anything was even worth it.

That night, on my birthday, I was in the run-down East Campus gym with my friend Van when he convinced me to go outside. I was led to my first ever surprise birthday party, complete with 15 of my friends and breast shaped candles on a Tosci’s cake. Seeing all my friends after a week of self-imposed social isolation led me to realize a few things.

My friends are all imperfect, but that is what makes them beautiful and interesting individuals. I was looking for an optimal way to live and balance my life, but there is none. Imperfections and flaws in the way I live my life define who I am. Doing what I find interesting at the present moment is far more fulfilling than grinding through tasks to match some preconceived notion of optimality. Even the more dangerous and highly illegal things that I had done this year add value to my life, as without those experiences I would be a strictly worse person (according to my own metric- the only one that matters).

MIT doesn’t teach you how to choose between ‘calculus’ and ‘real people’, and the undecidability of this problem often stumps even the smartest people here. But there are communities here that support you through the process, teach you that decidable problems are overrated anyway, and make you feel comfortable in your life decisions. I’m glad I’ve found one such community.

Freshmen Fall

The red luster of my cheap Christmas lights fades into veridian. A plume of smoke wafts up in the haze, up to the smoke detector covered with tinfoil, and disperses in hints of green. A cocktail of substances pulses in my bloodstream; I pause as they find a new interaction among themselves. My brain is tired of being euphoric. Through the window, dim lights from building 56 compete with the first streaks of sunlight. Tired but eager fingers run free as words spill hastily onto the screen, only partially coherent.

The last 4 months have been an angry blur. MIT can be unforgiving, as soon as you lose sight of what you want out of it. All the positive energy, effort and inspiration that makes this place often exceeds its own critical mass and explosively expresses itself in other forms. People and things are rarely ‘normal’ by any single definition of the word. Problem sets and Ecstasy, art and self-affliction, Advil and Adderall, kittens and suicide: every microcosm of the MIT experience is a struggle between the constructive and the destructive

Unsurprisingly, it can be a fun place to be in. You can trip through the halls, climb up the shafts, chill on the chimneys, and set fire(s) to(in) the nights. You can build roller coasters, organize insane parties, race rental vans through Boston and change hair colors faster than the weather. The work hard/party harder culture takes many tolls on you, but at the end of the day I know its the right fit for me. IHTFP.

Don’t Play League of Legends

Tags

addiction, esports, gaming, League of Legends

There was a time when I woke up while it was still technically morning and my dreams weren’t haunted by mad chemists spewing poison trails out their ass. Then I started playing League of Legends. Don’t make the same mistake. You can still salvage your life.

It seems entirely innocuous at first. You pick a character with certain abilities to fight other characters controlled by humans like yourself. There is a ton of strategy involved, and a wealth of gameplay variety. Soon, lust for the loading screen gets lodged in the deepest inner recess of your head like the fond yearnings of a newly found meth addiction.

Blue meth

For hours on end, in pursuit of perfect ‘plays’, you will find yourself raping your left mouse button while yelling expletives at random strangers. Those strangers will become your friends. Or as in my case, you will get you friends hooked; and they will become strangers, MOBA monsters of your own creation.

Your newly formed ‘League group’ will queue in many games together. Social dynamics will now be governed by KDA ratios, and the worst player in your team will get pigeonholed into playing ‘support’. Lifelong names will be forgotten as you will begin to respond only to your gamertag.

Adrenaline will rise, then fall, then succumb to a mid-life crisis because your body wasn’t programmed to trigger fight-or-flight responses when fighting a cartoon fox. You will begin to identify with the blobs of pixels you command, their grunts and war-cries will degrade your communication skill while your conversations will become peppered with League lingo.

The vocabulary of a viking and the body of a gamer. The perfect man.

For quick reference, ‘OP’ is overpowered. It will replace every positive adjective you ever learnt. The word ‘noob’ will grow heavier in negative connotation until you will use it with more enthusiasm than every colourful Hindi insult you ever picked up in your Indian neighbourhood.

And surely, you will spend money. Although League is free to play, premium skins cost money. You will buy them. The world championships (that is a thing) will roll around and you will watch the live stream, and cheer for Fnatic gaming almost as much as you cheered for India during an ODI.

Unfortunately, even after writing a sharp rant against the game, you won’t be able to stop. Don’t start playing League.

PS: Don’t add ZaphodF (me), Dracolynx or ChoronZoN Bael on League.

Stuff from November (AlphaBit archive)

Tags

alphabit, amity, competitive programming, programming, quiz

Last November, we hosted our own Tech Symposium at Amity Saket, AlphaBit. Out of 4 events, Quiz and Programming were probably the most exciting.

For programming, inspired by the IOI’11 problem Odometer, I wanted to make my own language. I ended up making MarvinSpeak, a language with just 8 commands. Coding in notepad, people could direct a virtual robot using it. I designed algorithmic tasks that required participants to manipulate red and blue objects.

Here’s the full problem statement with a description of the language:

MarvinSpeak

You can download the interpreter, along with test data and solutions here. The interpreter in Python was a heavily modified form of the original IOI’11 Odometer interpreter.

Quiz archive: Prelim, Prelim answers,  Finals

My favourite question from the quiz-

X’s growls were a mix-tape of various large mammals (mostly bears), while Y’s signature whistles are actually baby sounds manipulated to sound electronic. Meanwhile, the Z sound effect was achieved by combining the sound of a movie projector with the feedback made by holding a stripped cable by a TV set. Identify X, Y and Z.

The answers are respectively Chewbacca, R2D2 and lightsaber.

IOI ’13

Tags

algorithms, Australia, competitive programming, IOI

This year’s International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) was held in Brisbane, Australia. Making it to the 4-member Indian team involved a fair bit of luck, but this entry is not about those fortuitous circumstances. I choose instead to document the IOI experience itself because (1) Anything’s better than studying for your chemistry pre-board exam (2) Nerdy as it is, this was the first time I experienced true love. And I realized that it is all that matters.

Overall Experience

To clinically dispense with the niceties-

• The contest had a few organizational hiccups, but it was organized well overall
• I met some very interesting people. 80 countries is a lot of diversity, and Australians are fun hosts
• I learned new stuff (including the fact that ‘thong’ can refer to beach slippers)

My single dorm room

I can’t think of a more exact antithesis to me- pink decor draped in pink light-up roses, solid blocks spelling ‘MODE’ and a vintage radio. But I learnt to live with it. I had an upbeat flower-power alarm, the pictures of cats staring down at me gave me a rather nice wake-up jolt, and the overpowering incense kept unwanted people away.  In fact, I grew attached to my cozy dwelling.

Pradeep in my room

The people

I will not dwell upon how smart everybody else was. But after playing Twister with the Japanese, singing Beatles songs with Czech people and playing Mao/Uno with all of Grace college, I can testify that IOI participants are a lot more fun than you would expect them to be.

The place

We had two day excursions- Australia Zoo and Sunshine Coast. I didn’t get to see much of Queensland apart from that, but boy is it a beautiful place. The winter was harsh, but the sun came out from time to time. The animals were weird (WOMBATS MAKE NO EVOLUTIONARY SENSE).  In what other country would you find a possum running around in the contest hall or crocodile at the barbeque? Ah, Australia :”)

Our coach found true love too

The contest itself

(some bits adapted from my college supplement essay)

Halfway through the second day of IOI, I had 10 points out of 300.

Although I spat out 250 lines of code in the first half hour, I couldn’t debug the first problem (Game). With 2 hours to go, I feared returning to India empty-handed. I’d be the only member of my team without a medal. I could start with the other two questions, or continue to untangle this one.

As sandwiches were served, I remembered an amusing Douglas Adams line – “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Time was indeed a rather convincing illusion- it had made me forget why I was there in the first place.

Since I learnt my first algorithm (a humble sort) only six months before this date, I had spent countless hours hunched over my computer, trying to draw weird shapes and graphs in my head. During this period, I gave up on everything else- sleep, most of my social life and IIT-JEE prep (which meant India was no longer a viable place to go to college for me). No wonder I was under pressure.

But I realized that algorithms were the perfect manifestation of my obsessive compulsive and lazy-as-fuck traits, and nothing could come more naturally to me. This was true love, winning didn’t matter. As furious typing erupted around me like gunfire, I closed my eyes and thought deeply. This time, I understood. This time, it worked. I attacked the other two problems and got a 100 points in the space of an hour.

Somehow, the bronze was won.

The point here: all of us have those moments filled with regret and wall punching. I had many in the 6 month lead-up to IOI. A lifetime of sport/legal movie montages tried to tell me this, but I learnt it for myself now: when you find something you love, don’t give it up.

The most interesting contest problem

This is a bit controversial, but my favorite problem at IOI’13 was Art Class. (It is very different from the typical contest programming problem) You had to make an algorithm to distinguish between 4 different art styles:

• neoplastic modern art
• impressionist landscapes
• expressionist action
• colour field

Naturally, higher accuracies gave you greater scores. I went with a simple approach that chunked up areas, represented the areas as a graph, and found ‘connected components’ in each picture on the basis of colour. It didn’t work too well, and the buggy contest grader which gave no feedback didn’t help.

I heard a fascinating solution to this later: somebody enumerated 41 different attributes for the pictures, represented each picture as a point in 41-dimensional space, and used a clustering algorithm to separate the groups of pictures. This got him a 100/100.

How you can be a part of this

At IOI’13:

• China – 4  Gold
• Russia- 3 Gold, 1 Silver
• USA- 2 Gold, 2 Silver
• …
• Iran (I’m not kidding) – 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 1 Bronze
• …
• India-  4 Bronze (which is better than last year’s 1 Bronze)

This is why I made it to the team in just 6 months- we suck. Despite 2 camps, amazing coaches, and a ton of effort on our side, we were pitiful. There are a few reasons:

• There are much smarter kids in remote parts of India who don’t know about this
• People find out about algorithms too late. Even though I “knew” programming since a while, I never applied it formally anywhere- until I was in 11^th grade.
• Actual “computer science” and “mathematics” are not taught in school. CBSE Integration is fucking ugly, and completely useless.

Go ahead and give it a shot. Sign up on Codeforces or Codechef, where you can take part in programming contests. To know more about OI in India, click here.

Conception

Half a reasonably terrifying reign of terror ago, I was a little boy being hit by puberty in the face. Fond of technology and long mouthfuls of words sewn together into vaguely funny descriptors, I established a blog. It was defunct within a year. But now I’m bringing it back.

Most content on the internet is doomed to a lonely and vast permanence inhabited by pictures of bad Chinese food. The thought haunted me as I begun to write. Was there a point? Would somebody seriously read my rants when there were cats to ogle?

It doesn’t matter to me anymore. There is a tenuous line between experiences and memories. In my mind, visceral experiences lose color and fade into bland monochrome. That is when they become nothing more than memories. I’ve had an unforgettable year; there were moments in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Phoenix, Brisbane and San Francisco that deserved a retelling. Unfortunately, in the words of Pink Floyd,

I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I… have become… comfortably numb

To spare myself future regret, and create an outlet for sometimes necessary rage, this had to be done. Also, I just had to repost this-

Chance meeting with Ken Jeong. Best day of the year