猴子的小窝

Abstract

This post is about story during the recent COMAP MCM 2011 from Wed. Feb. 9 to Tue. Feb. 15.

摘　要

本帖是关于刚刚过去的2011年美国大学生数学建模比赛期间（从二月九日星期三到二月十五日星期二）发生的故事的。

1 Introduction

This paper is taking about the experience of the Monkey's first MCM racing. The Monkey and his partners are freshmen, whose team was the only freshmen team in BIT for this competition. Without knowledge and experience, they eventually took part in the competition.

2 Preliminaries

COMAP, the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, is an award-winning non-profit organization whose mission is to improve mathematics education for students of all ages. Since 1980, COMAP has worked with teachers, students, and business people to create learning environments where mathematics is used to investigate and model real issues in our world[1].

Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), challenges teams of students to clarify, analyze, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. The contest attracts diverse students and faculty advisors from over 500 institutions around the world[2].

Normally, MCM is running in 4 days from a 8PM EST to an another 8PM EST. BIT always provides extra opening of dormitories, classrooms and library for participators resting, discussing and searching. The questions will be published by COMAP on their website at the beginning of the competition. The final answer should be provided by a paper.

3 the Story

The Monkey and his partners were gathered on Wed. Feb. 9 in the Dorm 8 of Zhongguancun Campus of BIT. After check-in they went into their dormitory. As the Monkey learnt before, the dormitory was very old and bad. Thinking about the exciting competition, the Monkey accepted it.

Time flied awfully quickly. After the conference on Thu. Feb. 10 about something should be taken more care about during the competition, the beginning eventually came to the team.

3.1 Comprehension

Fetching the problems immediately, the team started the comprehension section of the competition. Thanks to the Monkey's partner Wang, the whole team got the problem understood very soon. Problem A asked to give a design of half-pipe[3] course to make a skilled snowboarder produce highest vertical air. Problem B was about organizing telecom repeaters to work in a given area and serve an amount of users. Problem C was a very boring question, which was excluded by the team at first.

3.2 Decision

When other teams were still in the comprehension, the team went to the decision section. Team mates were trying to search materials about each problems and then made decision by the amount of materials and the ideas. A blip made in this section was that the team did not use the source of library as the library opened in that afternoon, when they finished the problem decision.

3.3  Pondering

Finally, they chose Problem A and went to the Pondering section. The monkey had not learnt Differential Equation and some required Physics knowledge. His partners decided to figure out the exact shape of the course by calculation. As the experiences of the Monkey's four-years Informatics Olympics, the Monkey predicted this problem might not be solved as an exact answer.

The Monkey was trying to find more materials while his partners were trying to calculate. In the evening of Feb. 11, the Monkey went to the National Library of China to fetch more information. Also in that evening, his partners finished their first differential equation and tried to get it solved.

3.4 Writing

It happened as the Monkey predicted. The differential equation can not be solved maybe for their limitation of the knowledge in that field. Plan B had been made as a guarantee.

After another attempt, the team finally decided to run Plan B. The writing section had been started on Feb. 12 evening and finished on Feb. 13. The Monkey's partners decided to go home for their Valentine's Day.

3.5 Modifying

The Monkey then modified the paper on Feb. 14 and 15. After the first-time work all night, the final edition of the paper had been sent and printed in the morning of Feb. 15 before the deadline. During the modifying section, the Monkey saw another team's great argue because of a highly experienced team mate. The Monkey found one person of that team was very good in programing, but finally lost the chance to get into touch to him.

4 Conclusion

This is the first time of the Monkey to take part in the Modeling competition. Everything including blip is worth being remembered.

The Monkey has not joined the discussion at first, which may cause the direction mistake and the argue on the third day. But mostly, low experience in modeling, teamwork and English paper writing cause the imperfect performance.

References

[1] COMAP: Mathematics Instructional Resources for Innovative Educators.http://www.comap.com/, 2011. [Online; accessed 18-February-2011].

[2] COMAP: Mathematics Instructional Resources for Innovative Educators.http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/, 2011. [Online; accessed 18-February-2011].

[3] Wikipedia, Half-pipe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-pipe.