The Olympics is an annual bit of chaos, where computer science
graduate students joyfully prevent each other from doing work for
about a week and a half in January.
Students and faculty are divided into four teams. They compete in
various events that uncover unknown, innate talents such as the
ability to throw a frisbee down a hallway without tripping the fire
alarm and the ability to drop a rubber ball down a narrow stairwell.
The AI Olympics has been a fixture at the AI Lab for many years.
With the merger with LCS, 2006 is the third edition of the CSAIL
Olympics.
While the games are mostly silly fun for the participants, it's
deathly serious for the captains, as the captain from the 1st place
team gets to feast on the liver of the captain of the 4th place
team. No, we're just kidding. However, we do give out some good
prizes to all of the captains.
A team's final score is the sum of the normalized scores of each
of the events. Each event has 100 points total, and these points are
distributed based on the score of each team. In most events, the
scoring is heavily weighted by participation, so the way to make
your team win is to get your team members to show up by constantly
pestering them by email and in person.
Past olympics can be found here.