We say some very old cars today. The only problem was that we were in a hurry and couldn’t take pictures. Then when we could have taken pictures the cars were all gone. A shame really. It must have been some wort of show. We also listened to an orchestra during the opening ceremonies. It was very good, as one would expect. It was also the world premiere of the “ICPC Fanfare”.

Today was the Java Challenge—a contest in which we programmed the AI for a game. It was a very simple WarCraft-like game. Each person started with 10 peasants, 10 knights and one castle. The peasants are used to capture land. The more land you controlled, the faster you could produce more peasants and knights. The knights were used to kill other people’s peons, knights, and capture castles. Scoring was based on how many opponents you kill, and how many troops, and how much land you had at the end.

We didn’t end up doing very well. Our peasant strategy seemed to work very well, but we ran out of time to implement the knight strategy that we wanted. I didn’t help much, and for the most part felt like a useless third wheel. I hope I can help more tomorrow. I think I will, because the format for the Java Challenge is very different. Today, I felt like there was a lot of time wasted because only one person could be on the computer at a time. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

I can’t believe it will all be over tomorrow. It seems like I have been here a long time, but it also seems like I haven’t really done anything here. I haven’t bought anything. I haven’t really seen anything that I want to buy, except a top hat. I haven’t found anyplace that sells them though. It is a lovely city to walk through, but I can’t think of any souvenir that I might want. I guess I need to buy some postcards at the very least.

Well, that’s about all. I plan to go to bed early tonight because I have been tired and with a headache all day. I was fine yesterday, but today I think jet lag has finally caught up with me. Only one more day to eat the wonderful continental breakfast :-(