I originally planned on writing out a full explanation of the research in the paper that we submitted to ICML last Friday. However, since we uploaded to Arxiv at 10pm on Friday, and the verification process is slower over the weekends, I still don’t have a nice arxiv link to put in the post.

More importantly though, Wordpress doesn’t have LaTeX functionality, which makes any attempt at explaining math beyond arithmetic an extremely painful endeavor…

Instead, I’m going to write a Life Update, the second half of which will kinda be about the paper because it was the thing that I worked on and thought about in the week before the Jan 27 (AOE midnight) deadline.

I’ve also set up a mailing list, so if you enter your email into the “subscribe to our newsletter” form on the main page I’ll email you each time I post.

Week 3: Sun 1/16 - Sat 1/22

Hours: 9:40 (U), 10:00 (M), 9:30 (T), 12:35 (W), 10:00 (R), 13:00 (F), 10:10 (S)

For the first half of the week, I was still somewhat recovering from getting sick (which you can read about it in my previous life update). The period from Monday to Thursday was a delightful return to normal. After being sick for a week, and suffering through the accompanied decrease in quality of life, it was amazing being back to normal. I promised myself that I would appreciate my regained health, and I did. All in all, I lost ten pounds (mostly water) through the process. However, getting sick was a net positive on my mental health (?). It was a forced break where I didn’t think about complicated things – I thought a lot about god and pain.

Beginning on Friday though, the ICML paper grind began. It’s amazing how the days can be filled up; that day, I went to my Friday classes, winter rowing, ran physics club, made an amazing poster w/ Deven Huang, and then spent the rest of the night trying to solve the fact that I did not have a full convergence proof for our ICML submission.

On Saturday, the only thing I did was work on the paper, and this mainly took the form of me rereading papers. Throughout the entire process, I mainly referenced three papers, and I’ll reveal them in my full post about the paper. :)

Week 4: Sun 1/23 - Sat 1/29

Hours: 10:00 (U), 14:20 (M), 12:00 (T), 13:30 (W), 13:35 (R), 9:10 (F), 8:30 (S)

There are very few times in my logs when I was not-resting for more than 14 hours. Those were:

  • 2/18/2021 (14:30): Making my first ever podcast
  • 3/1/2020 (14:00): Doing a USACO on a Monday
  • 6/17/2021 (14:40): Taking AP CSA and then an official MOP Mock IMO, with Greenish in the afternoon

Hitting 14 hours is a momentous occasion. After all, 14 hours + 8 hours of sleep + 3 hours of life essentials requires 100% efficiency plus a little extra.

The period from Monday to Thursday when I made the most progress on the paper. I made an observation that put me in the right direction on Thursday at 10:30am while in Physics class, and then made the crucial observation at around 11:30am while in a SAC study room with DH. Thankfully, by some miracle, I didn’t have too much homework this week. Or maybe since I was sleeping less and had on average 13 hours of working time on my hands each day the homework load seemed really light.

I also think that I’ve mastered the art of handling midnight AOE times as an East coast person. Thursday at 11:59pm in AOE time is equal to Friday at 7am in EST time, so the technique I’ve used in my past two paper deadlines is to sleep from ~2:30 AM - ~5:00 AM. This is the perfect timing because you get a long block of time until 2:30 AM, and then wake up with a fresh mind, sync up with your collaborators, and then do a final 1.5 hours of grammar checking and higher quality edits since you’re slightly less sleep-deprived.

On Friday after submitting at 7am, I slept from 7:00-8:30 since I didn’t have classes until 9:20 AM. I got through classes and sports with only one person, HD, remarking about me looking tired, which I think is a great endorsement of the 2:45am - 5:15am nap as opposed to a full all-nighter. I took Friday night off, watched movies with C, went to the Lunar Banquet, and got home to Easton around 10pm, where I worked on the Arxiv version until 12:30am and then went to sleep. I slept in until noon on Saturday.

Looking Forward

While I lucked out and there wasn’t too much homework last week, God’s compensating for that this week.

I have

  • a presentation on the Froude number
  • a history essay
  • an English essay
  • a personal narrative for my college counselor.

I’m pretty excited though, if I can stay as efficient as I was in the week before the ICML deadline, I should be able to handle everything. Contestwise, I skipped USACO this weekend because I just didn’t have enough time, and AIME is terrifyingly only two weeks away.

Remarkably, this post only took 1 hour, and I really should get back to homework.