I still remember the day, I was in shorts practising long jump at the school gro und when the

computer teacher came and asked me "There is a competition involvin g maths and logic which none of the students in computer science are interested in attending, would you like to attend?" (I was in biology stream, no computer s cience) She was referring to ZIO 2011. I was too interested in going back to play that I instantly said "Yes". And she warned me that there would be some programming to do if I get selected for the next round. Speaking of programming, I wasn't entirely new to coding. Having started with BA SIC, LOGOturtle, etc back in 5th standard, and then simple programs in Visual Ba sic, I was acquainted with loops, and functions. I was also doing simple program s in C++ and had started using Linux Mint by that time. Thus on December 21, 2010, I attended the test along with 6 others from my schoo l who had no clue what they were answering and a hall full of such people. Lucki ly there was no negative marking, and there was ample time. For a question that had robots moving inside sudoku like squares, I just counted the number of rows and columns and randomly entered 13 as the answer. By half time, almost everyone had given up and left the hall. But, one guy from another school who was being lauded as the most intelligent guy before the test was still inside the hall. So , I decided to stay back and give my best. And I solved a (window sum) question by brute force method, actually counting all possiblities and adding them up. In cidentally, that morning my gmail, facebook accounts were cracked, deleted and d efaced by someone and I was sure if I left the hall early I would have that much more time to worry about it. I answered all the 6 questions. IARCS knows if eve n 1 was right. But I got selected for INOI 2011 which meant some of those answers were close to right. And that was the first programming competition I attended. I was the onl y one to get selected from that centre. Which meant I had to code alone for the contest. I learned enough of C++ in the month before the contest. And on the day before that, I googled and discovered art of problem solving and other sites wh ere the usual participants of this contest actively interact. From there, I lear ned dynamic programming on the night before the contest. And that's also the day my computer teacher told me Abhimanyu Mongandh Ambalath is an alumni of my school. When I went to the test centre, the school was closed because it was a holiday. The security let me and my teacher sit in his cabin for half an hour and then so meone came to open the gates. We then waited outside the computer lab while he r ead the instructions about what had to be done so that I can attend the competit ion. Finally, I was sitting alone solving two questions with a keyboard in which the 'i' key doesn't work well. I had a naive solution for the first question ab out geometry. But fortunately, the array I had to declare for that consumed too much memory and that forced me to find the simplest solution for the problem. Th e second one involved dynamic programming, a slight modification of a problem I had solved the previous night in IARCS archives. I had a solution that I'm still not sure of, and after countless corrections and additions of if-else clauses, it started giving the right output for the test cases given in the question pape r. I never bothered to worry about the solution going wrong with other cases and submitted the answers. Enough it was. I got selected to the IOI Training Camp along with 20 others. And there I learned all I know about algorithms now. (Along with cool party games l ike Mafia and Contact, playing multiplayer counter strike, hearing about Tor, kn owing how important python, about CMI, IIIT, that AoE can run on wine, and I als o stopped calling myself a patriot) That year, the winner had over 400 points overall, while I ended up with 5 point

s as the penultimate person in the leaderboard (for writing "return box"). Now, after joining MBBS, I still consider that camp as the best thing that's hap pened in my life (and the only reason why I still code)